Anthony Fauci Will Join Faculty at Georgetown University
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Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who served as the federal government’s top infectious disease specialist for nearly 40 years and played a key role in steering the United States through the coronavirus pandemic, will join the faculty of Georgetown University in Washington next month.
Dr. Fauci, 82, retired from the National Institutes of Health last year, having served as the director of its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. He was also the top Covid adviser to President Biden, a role he had filled under President Donald J. 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 spokeswoman 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 N.I.H., Dr. Fauci spent decades overseeing research on established infectious diseases — including H.I.V./AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria — and emerging ones like Ebola, Zika and Covid-19. He was also a principal architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a program that has delivered lifesaving treatment to more than 20 million people in 54 countries since its inception 20 years ago under 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 counseling calm for an anxious nation.
He was polarizing, too. Because his job frequently put him in the awkward position of publicly contradicting Mr. 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 nonpolitical” 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 center.
As for the memoir, Dr. Fauci told The Times that 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.”
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