Medical school alumnus is named surgeon general

Vivek Murthy, M.D., MBA, a 2003 graduate of the School of Medicine and the School of Management, has been named the nation’s 19th surgeon general.

Murthy was officially sworn in by Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell in December.

“I applaud the Senate for confirming Vivek Murthy to be our country’s next Surgeon General,” said President Barack Obama in a White House statement. “As ‘America’s Doctor,’ Vivek will hit the ground running to make sure every American has the information they need to keep themselves and their families safe.”

After graduating Yale, Murthy co-founded two organizations and jumpstarted international outreach projects to provide patients better health access and improve healthcare awareness. In 2010, he co-founded TrialNetworks, an online platform for coordinating clinical trials, which was acquired by DrugDev in 2014. In the lead-up to the Affordable Care Act, he served as president and co-founder of Doctors for America, which works to provide healthcare access to the general public.

Murthy, the first Yale alumnus to serve as U.S. Surgeon General, completed his residency in internal medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is an attending physician and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Howard P. Forman, M.D., professor of diagnostic radiology and director of Yale’s M.D./MBA Program, wrote in a blog post that the position will provide Murthy “but one more opportunity ... to apply his considerable talents.”