New Delhi: The World Bank on Monday selected Jim Yong Kim as its new president.
Mr Kim, president of Dartmouth College, will assume his new post on July 1 this year. Here is a look at the life of the new World Bank president.
Born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, Kim moved with his family to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa.
His father, a dentist, taught at the University of Iowa, where his mother received her PhD in philosophy. He attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian and president of his class and played quarterback for the football team. Kim graduated with an AB magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982.
He earned an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1991 and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 1993. He is married to Dr Younsook Lim, a pediatrician. The couple has two young sons.
He started his career as a lecturer (1993-1995) in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Since then, he has held various positions in the organisation, the latest being a professor of social medicine (2006-2009). He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropology, social analysis, social medicine, and global health in the medical school.
Mr Kim took office as the 17th president of Dartmouth College on July 1, 2009. Apart from being the first physician to serve as Dartmouth's president, he also is an anthropologist.
Before assuming the Dartmouth presidency, President Kim held professorships at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He also served as chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and director of the Francois Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health.
He is a co-founder of Partners in Health (PIH) and a former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization (WHO).
He led an academic consortium of more than a dozen institutions in developing a World Health Organization report, "Interactions Between Global Health Initiatives and Health Systems: Evidence From Countries." It was presented in June 2009 to the G8 Development Ministers' Meeting in Italy.
Through his work with PIH and WHO, President Kim has helped to demonstrate that individuals previously viewed as untreatable can be treated effectively, even in impoverished settings. He led the 3 by 5 initiative at WHO, which sought to treat 3 million new HIV/AIDS patients in developing countries with antiretroviral drugs by 2005.
Mr Kim's work has earned him widespread recognition. He was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship (2003), was named one of America's "25 Best Leaders" by US News & World Report (2005), and was selected as one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" (2006).
He was elected in 2004 to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences-one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine-for his professional achievements and commitment to service. Brown University awarded President Kim an honorary degree in 2009, and the Brown Alumni Association honored him with its William Rogers Award for Service to Society in 2008. In October of 2010, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He has published widely over the past two decades, authoring or co-authoring articles for leading academic and scientific journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and Science. Kim co-authored "Global Considerations in Medicine" for Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 17th edition (McGraw Hill, 2008).
Mr Kim has contributed to books on topics such as the global impact of drug-resistant tuberculosis and his edited volume, Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (Common Courage Press, 2002), which analyses the effects of economic and political change on health outcomes in developing countries.