Korean-born American Health Expert Jim Yong Kim selected to head the World Bank

The World Bank on 16 April 2012 appointed Korean-born American health expert Jim Yong Kim as its new president. Kim who is president of Dartmouth College, will assume his new post on 1 July 2012. He succeeded Robert Zoellick as the head of World Bank. The decision by the World Bank’s 25-member board was not unanimous. The emerging economies were found to be divided in their choice.

On 23 March 2012, President Barack Obama had announced that the United States would nominate Kim as the next president of the World Bank. His training and experience, including directing the World Health Organization’s HIV/Aids department and developing treatments for a form of drug resistant tuberculosis, gave him immediate credentials as a campaigner on behalf of the poor.

Kim, a physician and anthropologist won the job over Nigeria’s widely respected finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, with the support of Washington’s allies in Western Europe, Japan and Canada, as well as some emerging economies. The US’s grip on the job was thus retained. The selection process however frustrated several developing countries. 

  
Jim Yong Kim

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. He earned both his medical degree and his doctorate in anthropology at Harvard University, where he helped set up the Global Health Delivery Project.

Jim Yong Kim co-founded Partners In Health (PIH) in 1987. PIH focuses on community health programs for impoverished nations. Kim left PIH in 2003 to join the World Health Organization (WHO) as an adviser to the director-general. In March 2004, he was appointed as director of WHO’s HIV/AIDS department.

Beginning in 1993, Dr. Kim served as a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, eventually holding professorships in medicine, social medicine and human rights. During his time at Harvard, Kim published numerous articles for leading academic and scientific journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Science.

Unlike his predecessors, Kim is not a politician, a banker or a career diplomat. He has worked to bring health care to the poor in developing countries, be it fighting tuberculosis in Haiti and Peru or tackling HIV/Aids in Russian prisons.

In March 2009, Kim became the first Asian American to assume the post of president at an Ivy League institution when he was named the 17th President of Dartmouth College. Jim Kim is also the first Asian American, first physician, and first development professional to lead the Bank since its founding in 1944.