Top US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci to join Georgetown University faculty
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Dr Anthony Fauci retired from the National Institutes of Health last year.
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NEW YORK - The US government’s top infectious disease specialist for nearly 40 years, Dr Anthony Fauci, will join the faculty of Georgetown University in Washington next month.
Dr Fauci, 82, who played a key role in steering the United States through the coronavirus pandemic, retired from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last year, having served as the director of its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.
He was also the top Covid-19 adviser to US President Joe Biden, a role he had filled under former president Donald Trump. Georgetown announced his new job on Monday.
Dr Fauci will work at Georgetown’s School of Medicine and its McCourt School of Public Policy, the university said. A spokesman for Georgetown did not immediately respond to an inquiry seeking details about what courses he will teach. The university’s announcement said Dr Fauci’s role at the School of Medicine will be in an infectious disease division focused on education, research and patient care.
At the NIH, Dr Fauci spent decades overseeing research on established infectious diseases – including HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria – and emerging ones such as Ebola, Zika and Covid-19. He was also a principal architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, a programme that has delivered life-saving treatment to more than 20 million people in 54 countries since its inception 20 years ago under former president George W. Bush.
Dr Fauci was already a high-profile public health official when the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020. But the race to understand and respond to the virus quickly thrust him to the forefront of American life.
Through regular appearances at White House briefings, he became a larger-than-life personality counselling calm for an anxious nation. He was polarising, too because his job frequently put him in the awkward position of publicly contradicting Trump, he became an enemy of the political right and a hero to the left.
In an interview with The New York Times last year, Dr Fauci said he was “completely non-political” and “did not like nor seek out a position of having to publicly contradict a president of the United States”.
“The far right seems to think I did that deliberately and took pleasure in it,” he said. “I did not.”
When Dr Fauci retired last year, he said that he hoped to do some public speaking, write a memoir, become affiliated with a university and treat patients if it had a medical centre.
As for the memoir, Dr Fauci said he hoped to write a “real” one that told the story of his life, not just his turn in the national spotlight during the pandemic.
“I would much rather give a story of the whole me, from the time I grew up in the streets of Brooklyn to where I am right now,” he said. “But I don’t know. I’ve never written a book before.” The New York Times
