Short Biography

Mushtaque Chowdhury, PhD Mushtaque Chowdhury is an adviser to JPG SPH. He was the Vice Chair of BRAC, the largest and a most celebrated non-governmental organization globally. Previously, he was its Executive Director, founding Director of the Research and Evaluation Division and founding Dean of the BRAC University James P. Grant School of Public Health. Dr Chowdhury is also a Professor of Population and Family Health at Columbia University in New York which made him the first Bangladeshi to hold a professorial position in an Ivy League university. He also worked as the Senior Adviser and acting Managing Director for the Rockefeller Foundation and as a MacArthur Fellow at Harvard University. He is a champion of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in low- and middle-income countries on which he has written extensively. Dr Chowdhury received many awards including the prestigious ‘Medical Award of Excellence’ given by the Chicago- based Ronald McDonald House Charities (2017) and has been honored by The Lancet for his contribution to global health (2013). Dr Chowdhury is a founder of the Bangladesh Education Watch and Bangladesh Health Watch, two civil society watch-dogs. He is on the board and committees of several organizations and initiatives, including: • BRAC University (Trustee) • Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) (Senior Fellow) • South Asia Centre at the London School of Economics (Senior Adviser) • International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics (Senior Adviser) • The Asia-Pacific Action Alliance for Human Resources in Health (AAAH) (Past President) • Core Group for SDGs Implementation in Bangladesh (Centre for Policy Dialogue), and • The Dhaka University Statistics Department Alumni Association (DUSDAA) (Immediate past President). Dr Chowdhury holds a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA (Hon’s) in Statistics from the University of Dhaka. He has published nearly 200 articles in national and international journals. The following are his three recent books, published in 2021: 1. “Corona Tale: A Bangladeshi family’s pen war against the pandemic”, Dhaka, AnyoProkash 2. “Practical Epidemiology: Using epidemiology to support primary health care”, Oxford, Oxford University Press 3. “Amar Brac Jibon” (an autobiography), Dhaka, Prothoma Prokashon.