The Senate has confirmed Jayanta Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health by a vote of 53 to 47. He is set to take over as head of the NIH, a role held by Matthew Memoli since January 2025 in an acting capacity.
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Bhattacharya’s Credentials
Bhattacharya, whom then President-Elect Donald Trump nominated in November 2024, serves as a professor of medicine at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute and director of Stanford’s Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
The newly-confirmed NIH director is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and at Acumen.
He holds a doctorate degree in economics from Stanford University and a doctor of medicine degree from the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Priorities as NIH Director
During his confirmation hearing on March 5, Bhattacharya told Senate lawmakers that his priorities as NIH director would include a greater emphasis on chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity.
Bhattacharya also said the NIH should be more open to dissenting perspectives regarding scientific issues. Bhattacharya himself held dissenting views regarding the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as articulated in an open letter released in October 2020 called the Great Barrington Declaration, which he co-authored.
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