Mushtaque Chowdhury

Mushtaque Chowdhury is the Vice Chair and Adviser to the Founder and Chairperson of BRAC, the world’s largest non-governmental organization. Previously, he was its Deputy Executive Director, founding Director of the Research and Evaluation Division and founding Dean of the James P. Grant School of Public Health.

Dr Chowdhury is also a Professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University in 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 (Hon’s.) from the University of Dhaka.

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, The Scientific American and the New England Journal of Medicine. One of his recent books is From One to Many: Scaling Up Health Programs in Low Income Countries (co-edited with Richard Cash et al.), published in 2011.

Dr Chowdhury is the coordinator of the Bangladesh Education Watch, a civil society watch-dog on education. He is on the board and committees of several organizations and initiatives, including: International Advisory Board of the Centre for Sustainable International Development at the University of Aberdeen, and the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS) Foundation.