Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD

Dr. Ashwin Vasan is a physician, epidemiologist, and public-health reformer who has spent his career tackling the systemic causes of poor health and preventable illness and suffering New York, nationally, and globally. As New York City’s 44th Health Commissioner from 2022 through 2024, he built and passed HealthyNYC into law, a first-in-the-nation plan to raise life expectancy by closing preventable death and health inequity gaps through targeted investments in prevention, affordability, and community health. Under his leadership, life expectancy in New York City bounced back to nearly pre-Covid levels, reflecting not only improvements in managing the virus, but also the first declines in overdose deaths in a decade, improvements in screenable cancer deaths, amongst other gains.

He made affordability and transparency a major focus of health leadership in the City, launching a $2 billion medical-debt relief initiative for more than 500,000 low-income New Yorkers - the largest local program of its kind. During his tenure the health department also launched the Office of Healthcare Accountability to encourage hospital price transparency, and he fought directly to ensure the City’s share of the NYS Medicaid 1115 Waiver was put toward community-based, preventive care in the highest need neighborhoods across the five boroughs.

Dr. Vasan also brought unprecedented attention and resources to mental health, launching the first citywide mental-health plan that specifically prioritized the vulnerable, expanding access to care for people living with serious mental illness, embracing digital tools to close access gaps for young people, and declaring social media a public health crisis while suing major platforms over their harm to young people. He doubled city funding for psychosocial rehabilitation clubhouses, resulting in 15 new sites opening up citywide, expanded funding for mobile treatment teams, and increased pay for supportive housing providers, and launched NYC TeenSpace, a free digital front door for therapy and support that has already reached over 40,000 NYC teens with licensed counseling and therapy.

Before government service, he led the nonprofit Fountain House, expanding it from a local direct services agency to a national leader in community mental-health advocacy and reform, and making it central to rebuilding NYC's mental health infrastructure. Through the first decade of his career, he worked globally with Partners in Health and the World Health Organization in Uganda, Rwanda, Lesotho, Boston, and Geneva, where he focused on expanding access to HIV/AIDS treatment.  After a decade on the faculty of Columbia Mailman and VP&S and as a practicing physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, he recently joined Yale a Senior Fellow, and holds additional positions as the James McCune Smith Distinguished Fellow at Meharry, and Senior Advisor to Commonweal Ventures and to several AI-focused startups, ensuring that the technology is applied equitably and fairly for clinicians and for working people. He also serves on the boards of several nonprofits, focused on mental health and healthcare, including the Child Mind Institute, The Mental Healthcares Coalition, and insep.