• Press Release

Jeffrey D. Sachs, PhD, Joins Mount Sinai for Two-Year Visiting Fellowship

  • New York, NY
  • (September 20, 2016)

The Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai today announced it is hosting professor of economics, senior United Nations advisor, bestselling author and sustainable development leader Jeffrey D. Sachs, PhD, on a visiting fellowship through 2018.  
Professor Sachs, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty, will be examining how New York City’s largest healthcare system, Mount Sinai, can contribute to the UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 3: Good Health and Well Being. The SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which rallied the world around a common agenda to tackle the indignity of poverty.  

“The Arnhold Institute is honored to host Professor Sachs as he shares his expertise on economic, public policy, and public health with the Mount Sinai community as it rises to the challenges the U.S. healthcare industry is facing as it transforms,” said Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD, Director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health and Chair, Department of Health System Design and Global Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

“The issues facing healthcare right now are not just of a clinical and operational nature, but connect to public policy and macroeconomics as well, and we couldn’t be more proud to have the world’s thought leader on sustainable development to help Mount Sinai leverage broader thinking to advance our work effectively,” said Dr. Singh, who also co-founded the One Million Community Health Worker Campaign with Jeffrey Sachs, which is an initiative of the African Union and UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

In his new role at Mount Sinai, Professor Sachs will provide insights from his work in international economic development into the challenges of achieving universal health coverage amidst the ongoing implementation of the Affordable Care Act. He will be hosting and joining seminars throughout his time at Mount Sinai and collaborate directly with the Department of Health System Design and Global Health, Mount Sinai Health Partners, and the Department of Population Health Science and Policy. Recently, Professor Sachs led a team of Mount Sinai executives to Ghana to learn how Ghana is implementing a national electronic health system.

“For decades, Jeffrey Sachs has been committed to helping populations around the world escape from poverty and fight high disease burdens through strengthened primary health systems,” said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and President for Academic Affairs for the Health System. “His pioneering ideas on investing in health to break the poverty trap have been widely applied in Africa and beyond, and it is our hope to benefit from his expertise as we expand and improve our models of care for vulnerable and underserved patients in the communities we serve.”

“We are honored to welcome Jeffrey Sachs to Mount Sinai, knowing that he brings unparalleled expertise in designing solutions to some of the most complex challenges in providing healthcare to the world’s most vulnerable populations,” said Niyum Gandhi, chief population health officer for the Mount Sinai Health System.

"Whether in New York City or globally, poverty should not be a barrier to anyone's ability to obtain quality health care," said Jeffrey D. Sachs, "I commend Mount Sinai's commitment to designing next-generation healthcare models, devising cost-effective business solutions to accelerate them, and using pioneering data-driven methods and new technologies to scale them. I greatly look forward to collaborating with Dr. Prabhjot Singh and his team, as well as with the many innovators across the Mount Sinai Health System who are committed to advancing health in underserved populations and eliminating disparities in quality and access to care."

Professor Sachs served as the Director of the Earth Institute from 2002 to 2016. He was appointed University Professor at Columbia University in 2016, and also serves as Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Sustainable Development Goals, and previously advised both UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. For more than thirty years he has advised dozens of heads of state and governments on economic strategy, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Prior to joining Columbia, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard.

About the Mount Sinai Health System

Mount Sinai Health System is one of the nation’s leading integrated academic health systems and one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area. Its comprehensive system includes seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, over 600 research and clinical laboratories, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing. Together, the Health System comprises approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses.

As a leading learning health system, Mount Sinai combines clinical expertise with scientific discovery to improve patient care while training the next generation of health care and biomedical leaders. The Health System provides care across every stage of life, from prenatal care through geriatrics, while advancing personalized medicine through artificial intelligence, data science, and biomedical research.

Mount Sinai is consistently recognized among the nation’s leading academic health systems for patient care, research, and education. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 1 in New York by Newsweek and No. 5 on the magazine’s World’s Best Hospitals list. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ranks No. 11 among U.S. medical schools and No. 1 among freestanding medical schools for National Institutes of Health funding, reflecting the strength of its scientific enterprise and leadership in biomedical research.

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