Paul Farmer

Farmer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Bronislaw Malinowski Award and the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, with his Partners In Health colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, from which he was awarded the 2018 Public Welfare Medal.

He is known as "the man who would cure the world," as described in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. The story of Partners In Health is also told in the 2017 documentary Bending the Arc.

In December 2012, Farmer was appointed as the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti.

In May 2009, Farmer was named Chair of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, succeeding Jim Yong Kim, his longtime friend and colleague. In 2012, Kim was appointed President of the World Bank. On December 17, 2010, Harvard University's President, Drew Gilpin Faust, and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, named Farmer as a University Professor, the highest honor that the University can bestow on one of its faculty members.

In August 2009, Farmer was named United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti (serving under former U.S. President Bill Clinton), in his capacity as Special Envoy.

In 2003, the author Tracy Kidder wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, which describes Farmer's work in Haiti, Peru, and Russia.

In 1987, Farmer, along with Jim Yong Kim, Ophelia Dahl, Thomas J. White and Todd McCormack, co-founded Partners In Health. PIH began in Cange in the Central Plateau of Haiti and currently works in 12 sites across the country. Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais provides tertiary care to patients. Partners In Health also works in Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Russia, and Navajo Nation. The University of Global Health Equity is an initiative of Partners In Health focused on delivering the highest quality of health care by addressing the critical social and systemic forces causing inequities and inefficiencies in health care delivery.

Farmer was born in North Adams, Massachusetts and raised in Weeki Wachee, Florida. His brother is former professional wrestler Jeff Farmer. He is a graduate of Hernando High School in Brooksville, Florida, where he was elected president of his senior class. He attended Duke University as a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar, graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in medical anthropology in 1982. He attended Harvard University, earning an MD and a PhD in medical anthropology in 1990. He completed an internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1993 and an infectious disease fellowship in 1996.

Paul Edward Farmer (born October 26, 1959) is an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer holds an MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he is the Kolokotrones University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He is professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Additionally, Farmer serves as the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti.