Alumnus Vivek Murthy confirmed as surgeon general

The Senate voted 51–43 on December 15 to confirm the nomination of Vivek Murthy as the nation’s 19th surgeon general.

Murthy is a member of the Class of 2003 who received his M.D. and MBA degrees from Yale. As an undergraduate at Harvard he launched a program that sent college students from the U.S. to India to do peer education work on HIV/AIDS. He also started a community health partnership, which trained young women in rural India to be health educators and basic health care providers for their communities.

Murthy was the speaker at Commencement in May.

After graduating from medical school Murthy founded TrialNetworks, social networking platforms that enhance communication, collaboration, and overall efficiency in clinical trials, and he is a co-founder of the 16,000-member Doctors for America.

Murthy completed his residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he is an attending physician and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School.

For more on Murthy’s background, including comments by his former professors and classmates at Yale, see this 2013 article on the Yale Medicine website: As a Yale student, surgeon general nominee’s energy and compassion were apparent.