Ashwin Vasan
Dr. Vasan is the founding Executive Director of the Health Access Equity Unit at the NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. This unit – the first of its kind in the nation – is focused on bringing healthcare and public health solutions to bear on social systems challenges for specific marginalized populations in New York City that are often overlooked by existing systems. The unit puts a specific emphasis on people exposed to the criminal justice system and other populations with disproportionate trauma and complex health and social needs, and leverages the Department's historical strengths in epidemiology and surveillance, administrative data integration and analysis, program implementation at the intersection of clinical and community systems, and policy and regulatory reform to reduce barriers to engagement and the quality of health and human services for those in greatest need. This new role builds off of Vasan's 15 years of experience at the intersection of global health and primary care, working with Partners In Health in Rwanda, Lesotho, and Boston, and the World Health Organization in Geneva and Uganda, under World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. Vasan's methodological expertise involves implementation science, quality and performance improvement studies, and evaluations of large-scale clinical and public health interventions. At Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, he was formerly the Deputy Director of ARCHeS, a $17M program of health systems development and research in Ghana and Tanzania, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. He continues to teach a graduate seminar in Implementation Science and Global Health at Mailman, and is a practicing Internist in the Division of General Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia Irving Medical Center, where he supervises trainees and cares for a predominately low-income Medicaid/Medicare and uninsured population. In addition, Vasan holds a non-clinical affiliate appointment as an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at the Brigham & Women's Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. He received his MD from the University of Michigan, his PhD in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and holds a MSc in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Biography current as of June 19, 2018