Jay Bhattacharya Tapped to Lead National Institutes of Health

In early April, following his Senate confirmation, Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine at the Stanford Medical School, became the 18th Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, with a budget of $47 billion in 2024, is the largest federal funder of medical research on the causes, treatments for, and cures of diseases. Bhattacharya holds both an MD and PhD in economics from Stanford University, and he has studied a range of issues in health economics, demography, and the economics of innovation. He was appointed as a Faculty Research Fellow in the NBER Health Care (now the Economics of Health) program in 2002 and promoted to Research Associate in 2009. He resigned his NBER appointment when he was nominated to lead the NIH.