Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD

Dr. Ashwin Vasan served as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Senior Public Health Advisor to the City of New York (2021–2024), where he led initiatives to improve life expectancy, reform mental health systems, reduce medical debt, and expand access to reproductive and maternal health care. An alum of UCLA, Harvard, and the Univeristy of Michigan, he has worked to advance health, social welfare, and public policy for vulnerable people nationally and globally for more than 20 years. As a practicing primary care physician, epidemiologist, and health leader, centering mental health in the public health agenda has been a major focus of his work, including expansion of community services and payment models for people with severe mental illness, building digital tools like NYC TeenSpace and prioritizing social media as a threat to youth mental health, and expanding integrated approaches to tackling the fentanyl crisis. Dr Vasan previously served as President and CEO of the national mental health services nonprofit, Fountain House, where he scaled its national reach, founded NYC’s Health Access Equity Unit, a first-of-it’s-kind government partnership between healthcare and public health to serve vulnerable people in the justice system, and held roles with Partners In Health and the WHO for the first decade of his career, where he focused on the response to the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. Dr Vasan is currently a Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as well as a James McCune Smith Distinguished Fellow at the Meharry School of Global Health, after holding various faculty and clinical appointments at Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for the last 15 years. He has three young children and is an avid swimmer, biker, reader, and home cook.