Dartmouth College announced this afternoon that Jim Yong Kim, a physician known for his work in the global campaign against AIDS, would be its new president.
Dr. Kim, who is 49, will assume the presidency at a time when the Ivy League institution has been undertaking a series of painful budget cuts and layoffs following a steep drop in the value of its endowment. He will succeed James Wright, who had previously announced he would resign after 11 years as president, on July 1.
Dr. Kim is chairman of the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he earned his M.D. (he got a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard too). Dr. Kim received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 2003. Raised in Iowa, Dr. Kim is a native of South Korea who came to the United States with his parents when he was 5 years old. He is one of the few people of Asian heritage to lead a major American university.
We’ll have more details in an article on our Web site tomorrow. —Goldie Blumenstyk
