Jay Bhattacharya

Jayanta Bhattacharya (born 1968) is an American health economist, trained as a physician, who has served as the 18th director of the National Institutes of Health since 2025. Bhattacharya had additionally served as the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since. Bhattacharya earned his M.D. and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. He does not practice medicine but specializes in health economics. Bhattacharya was a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University until March 2025, when he left his position and became an emeritus professor so that he could start his position at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He also was an investigator at Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging whose research focused on the economics of health care. In November 2024, President Donald Trump named Bhattacharya as his choice to lead the NIH, and he was confirmed by the United States Senate on March 25, 2025. Bhattacharya is the first Indian American to lead the NIH. He opposed the lockdowns and mask mandates imposed in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through widespread infection, while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus.