The list of leadership positions that Jim Yong Kim has held over his distinguished career is a veritable roster of the world’s most prominent global public health and development agencies, non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, and private sector investors.  

He has served as president of the World Bank Group, president of Dartmouth College, director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He co-founded Partners In Health (PIH), a non-profit medical organization that provides high-quality health care to poor communities on four continents.

Currently, Kim is a Partner, Vice Chairman, and Emerging Markets Chairman at Global Infrastructure Partners (a part of BlackRock), a fund that invests in infrastructure projects across several sectors around the world.

In each of his leadership roles, Kim’s career has focused on health, education, and improving the lives of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. It’s a focus deeply rooted in his lived experiences. Born in South Korea to parents who had fled the violence of the Korean War, Kim grew up in Muscatine, Iowa, then earned a BA in human biology from Brown University, followed by an MD and PhD in medical anthropology from Harvard University. As a physician and anthropologist, Kim was the first leader of the World Bank Group who did not come from the financial or political sectors and the first who had personal experience tackling development issues in low-income countries.

Given this unique background, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Kim helped usher in a stream of innovative initiatives at organizations he’s led. Partners In Health, the non-profit he co-founded with the late Paul Farmer and others, has been in the vanguard of efforts to implement treatment programs for complex, deadly diseases, such as multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, in low-income countries. At WHO, he led the “3 by 5” initiative, the first-ever global goal for AIDS treatment, which greatly expanded access to antiretroviral medication in developing countries. On his watch, the World Bank Group launched several new financial instruments, including facilities to address infrastructure needs, prevent pandemics, and help the millions of people forcibly displaced from their homes by climate shocks, conflict, and violence.

Today, as global public health challenges continue to rapidly evolve, Kim remains engaged at the highest levels seeking innovative approaches and forging new partnerships aimed at addressing the world’s most entrenched inequities.

Dr. Kim will visit the University of Iowa campus on Friday, Oct. 11, as the College of Public Health’s 2024 Hansen Leadership Award honoree, where he will address students, faculty, and staff in a lecture entitled, “Reflections on 40 Years in Global Health: Faith in Things Unseen.” Ahead of his visit, he took time to answer a few questions.

You earned a PhD in anthropology along with your MD degree. How has the anthropological framework influenced your career and your approach to global development work, including initiatives at Partners in Health, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank?

My graduate anthropology training was one of the most rewarding and intellectually stimulating periods of my life. Anthropology has been called “applied philosophy” and indeed, reading the works of so many of the great scholars of the Western tradition was a wonderful experience. That intellectual grounding, along with training in ethnographic methods, has informed everything I have done since those early years of my career. The fundamental ethnographic question that I was taught in graduate school — “Who are these people and what do they want?” — is one I ask myself constantly. If you can understand who people are at their core and what matters to them, you can be a much more effective team member and leader.     

Headlines in 2024 are filled with cataclysmic events — wars, famine, ecological disasters — that dramatically impact public health and threaten to reverse many of the health advances that have been realized throughout the world in recent decades. What advice do you have for public health practitioners and students who are faced with such large-scale challenges?

We are indeed in a time of multiple global crises and while daunting, they also represent an opportunity to reimagine global health. Investing in primary health care, strengthening health systems at the community level, and addressing the social and economic determinants of health are all important projects that we must push forward.  But I also believe that emerging technologies can potentially help us leapfrog generations of public health practice and improve health outcomes more rapidly. AI-based radiology, for example, has dramatically improved tuberculosis detection in some of our Partners in Health (PIH) project sites, and there are many more innovations that we must bring to the poorest people in the poorest communities. Pay attention to these new possibilities and explore ways to bring them to the poorest communities.

But most importantly, we must not lose sight of our shared humanity and the power of collective action. Throughout my career, I’ve seen that when people come together — across sectors, across borders, and across ideologies — we can achieve remarkable things. To the public health practitioners and students of today, I say: Your role is more critical than ever. Embrace innovation, think boldly, and never underestimate the impact you can have when you work with other committed souls. Paul Farmer, my PIH co-founder, said it best: “With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others — or, in a word, partnership.”

In recent years, you’ve focused attention on the immense challenge of the unmet mental health needs here in the United States and around the world. What motivates your focus in this area? Are there lessons from global efforts to combat tuberculosis, HIV, COVID, and other diseases that could be applied in the arena of mental health treatment?

I was trained by some of the greatest figures in mental health like Professors Arthur Kleinman and Leon Eisenberg and former US Surgeon General Julius Richmond, so I was always aware of the challenges in this field. But more recently, I was shocked to learn of the extent to which lack of access to the best new therapies is a problem in countries at every income level. Mental health remains one of the most neglected areas in public health, and coupled with the growing burden of mental illness that has been exacerbated by recent global crises like COVID-19, I began to think that mental health may benefit from a movement like the one that transformed the prospects for people living with HIV in poor countries. 

Just as we built a social movement and developed innovative delivery models for antiretroviral therapy in resource-poor settings, I believe we can find creative ways to scale up newer and more effective evidence-based mental health interventions. Moreover, the global response to diseases like HIV and TB has shown us the power of political will and sustained funding. If we can mobilize similar commitments for mental health, we could dramatically improve access to care for everyone.

When you visit the University of Iowa on Oct. 11, you’ll be presenting a lecture entitled “Reflections on 40 Years in Global Health: Faith in Things Unseen.”  Without giving too much away, can you give us a “tree tops” preview of what you might be discussing in the lecture? Something to whet the appetite of your audience?  

This lecture will be focused on the unwavering “faith” that we shared at PIH, in our capacity to solve seemingly insurmountable health challenges, even when the path forward wasn’t immediately clear. I’ll share personal stories from my experiences combating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru, scaling up HIV treatment in resource-poor settings, and leading global institutions like the World Bank. I hope these stories will illustrate the ways in which this particular kind of faith — in science, in human potential, and in the power of collective action — has been a driving force behind some of the most significant public health achievements of our time.

This principle of “faith in things unseen” is more crucial now than ever as we face unprecedented global challenges. From climate change to emerging infectious diseases, from mental health crises to widening health disparities, the obstacles are daunting. But by cultivating this faith — by first envisioning then working towards a better future even when it seems impossible — we can ultimately overcome these challenges. This concept applies not just to global leaders and policymakers, but to every individual working in or studying public health.

Thank you very much! We’re excited for your visit to the University of Iowa campus.

Find more details about the Hansen Distinguished Lecture here.