DR. MUSHTAQUE CHOWDHURY
Vice-Chairperson, BRAC and
Member of the Board of Trustees, BRAC University
BIO: Dr. Ahmed Mushtaque Raza Chowdhury is the Vice-Chairperson of BRAC and Member of the Board of Trustees, BRAC University. Dr. Mushtaque was the founding director of Research and Evaluation division of BRAC and the founding Dean of the James P. Grant School of Public Health at BRAC University. Dr. Mushtaque Chowdhury is a Professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, New York. During 2009-12, he worked as the Senior Adviser to the Rockefeller Foundation, based in Bangkok, Thailand. He also served as a MacArthur Fellow at Harvard University. Dr. Chowdhury holds a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA in Statistics from the University of Dhaka. He is (probably) the first Bangladeshi to hold a professorial position in an Ivy League university.
Dr Chowdhury is a founder of the Bangladesh Education Watch and Bangladesh Health Watch, two civil society watch-dogs on education and health respectively. He is on the board and committees of several organizations and initiatives, including: Board of Trustees of BRAC University in Bangladesh, International Advisory Board of the Centre for Sustainable International Development at the University of Aberdeen in UK, Member of the Board for Humanitarian Leadership Academy, London, and Member of Technical Advisory Committee of Compact2025 at International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC and Expert Group on scaling up in Education at the Results for Development (R4D), Washington DC. Recently he has been elected as the chair of Asia-Pacific Action Alliance for Human Resources on Health (AAAH).
Dr. Chowdhury was a coordinator of the UN Millennium Task Force on Child Health and Maternal Health, set up by the former Secretary General Kofi Annan. He is a co-recipient of the Innovator of the Year 2006 award from the Marriott Business School of Brigham Young University in USA and in 2008 he received the PESON oration medal from the Perinatal Society of Nepal. He has wide interest in development, particularly in the areas of education, public health, poverty eradication and environment. Dr. Chowdhury has published over 150 articles in peer-reviewed international journals including the International Journal on Education, the Lancet, the Social Science & Medicine, Journal of International Development, The Scientific American and the New England Journal of Medicine. Two of his recent books are: From One to Many: Scaling Up Health Programs in Low Income Countries (co-edited with Richard Cash et al., University Press Ltd., Dhaka) and Institutionalizing Health and Education for All (co-authored with Colette Chabbott, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York & London).