Dr. Ashwin Vasan is the 44th Health Commissioner of New York City. He is a practicing primary care physician, epidemiologist, and health policy expert with nearly 20 years of experience working to improve hysical and mental health and social outcomes in New York City, nationally, and globally.

In his role as Commissioner since early 2022, Dr. Vasan has led the nation’s oldest and strongest public health agency through an unprecedented time of challenge and transition, reshaping the city’s health system to address the main drivers of declining life expectancy in the post-COVID emergency era - including overdoses, chronic and diet-related diseases, birth inequities, climate change, and gun violence -- and culminating in the launch of HealthyNYC, the city’s plan for healthier, longer lives. He has built a coalition of public, private, nonprofit, philanthropic, and government agencies behind this common vision, and worked closely with the New York City City Council to pass Local Law 93, codifying HealthyNYC into city planning, to be revised and reported on every five years in perpetuity, regardless of the administration.

Throughout this work, he has brought a unique, unparalleled focus to mental health, releasing a citywide population mental health plan addressing the crisis plaguing youth; New Yorkers with severe mental illness; and people at risk of drug overdose. In support of the plan his team launched NYC TeenSpace, a digital front-door to mental health care available to more than 400,000 New Yorkers aged 13-17; declared social media a public health crisis and led the city’s litigation against TikTok, YouTube, SnapChat, and Meta; doubled funding to more than million to scale capacity and enrollment in the city’s psychosocial clubhouse system to 15,000 people with SMI; led the NYC strategy on opioid settlement funds, including expanding naloxone access, launching public health vending machines, scaling treatment resources, and continuing to support overdose prevention centers as life-saving solutions; and has invested in workforce wellbeing, improving staff morale and job satisfaction, and reducing turnover, by addressing pay equity, mental health care access and benefits, and launching new, innovative wellness programming including Lets Talk! NYC Health, a program to train managers and leaders to support staff with mental health needs and support conversations about mental health in the workplace.

Dr. Vasan has simultaneously strengthened the Health Department’s emergency response-readiness capacities, improving its financial and program planning, investing significantly in communications, and modernizing its data systems with the launch of the Center for Population Health Data Science, a state-of-the-art data hub that leverages advanced technology, informatics, data engineering, and AI, creating a real-time citywide disease surveillance system capable of responding to the next pandemic and addressing routine acute and chronic health priorities in the city.

Dr. Vasan has led multiple crisis responses during his tenure, including the COVID-19 pandemic, combatting the 2022 mpox outbreak as the first jurisdiction to do pre-exposure vaccination, pioneering readiness and response to the first case of polio in the US in a decade, and rebuilding the TB program in the face of years of cuts and a dramatic rise in infections.

In the wake of the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court, Dr Vasan led the city’s charge on protecting reproductive rights by launching the NYC Abortion Access Hub, connecting people from New York and nationwide to providers, convening a first-of-its-kind citywide taskforce of abortion providers to engage in central planning and strategy, becoming the first jurisdiction in the US to offer free medication abortions in its clinics and by telehealth care, while also revising data collection and surveillance to protect privacy and safety. And under his leadership, in an effort to strengthen partnership with healthcare while also serving as a citywide watchdog, the Health Department launched a historic debt relief initiative to purchase and cancel billion in medical debt for half a million working class New Yorkers. The Department also launched the Office of Healthcare Accountability which will produce a price transparency tool and allow for strengthened negotiation with providers who charge vastly different rates for the same medical services. Dr Vasan began his career in global health working at Partners in Health and the HIV Department of the World Health Organization, and most recently served as the President and CEO of Fountain House, a US-based mental health nonprofit. For more than a decade, he has served on the faculty at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeon, where he continues to see patients and teach trainees.

Dr. Vasan received his BA in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles; his ScM in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health; his MD from the University of Michigan; and his PhD in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He completed his clinical training in internal medicine-primary care at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He serves as the Board Chair and President of the Fund for Public Health of New York City, and serves on the Boards of the Greater New York Hospital Association, New York Academy of Medicine, Public Health Solutions, and NYC Health+Hospitals.

He is published extensively in the academic literature in journals such as the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Health Policy and Planning, and AIDS, as well as in the popular press, New York Times, BBC World News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, and NBC News.