President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, Dr. Tom Frieden is a physician trained in internal medicine, infectious diseases, public health, and epidemiology. He is former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former commissioner of the New York City Health Department.
Dr. Frieden began his public health career in New York City leading efforts that documented and ended the largest outbreak of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis to occur in the US. He was then assigned to India, on loan from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he helped scale up a program for effective tuberculosis diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring that saved millions of lives. Asked to return to New York City to become Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s Health Commissioner, he directed efforts to reduce smoking and other leading causes of death that increased life expectancy by 3 years. He helped start Mike Bloomberg’s global health philanthropy, particularly the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, which has helped countries implement measures that will prevent more than 35 million deaths. As Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Frieden oversaw the work that helped end the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic.
Dr. Frieden founded Resolve to Save Lives in 2017 and leads the organization’s efforts to partner with countries to prevent 100 million deaths from cardiovascular disease and to make the world safer from epidemics. In the organization’s first 7 years, these efforts had prevented nearly 8 million deaths.
His essays and scientific articles provide insights on a wide range of health problems—and how to address them—in the United States and around the world.