When Victor Dzau, M.D., wrapped up his second term as president of the National Academy of Medicine in June, he had plenty of options to extend his luminary career in academic healthcare and research. But he considered only one: coming home to Duke.
“I took a leave of absence, so I never really left Duke,” says Dzau, who served as Duke’s chancellor of health affairs and president of the Duke University Medical Center from 2004 to 2014. “I’ve planted so many seeds here, and I still feel there is so much more potential and opportunity. This is the right place for me.”
But there is one new facet to Dzau’s second stint at Duke. In addition to his position as James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine, he will spend time working with the faculty and leadership of the Duke Global Health Institute, an initiative he helped launch in 2006. In September, he officially joined the DGHI faculty and moved into an office on the second floor of Trent Hall, a home base from which he hopes to lend expertise and insights gained over nearly half a century of research and academic leadership.
Before coming to Duke in 2004, Dzau was chair of the Department of Medicine at Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where his faculty included a young Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D. He was previously chief of cardiovascular medicine and chair of medicine at Stanford University. Dzau’s research on hypertension in the 1970s and 1980s helped lay the groundwork for the development of ACE inhibitors, now among the most effective medications for high blood pressure and congestive heart failure.
As Duke Health’s chancellor, Dzau led the development of several new initiatives that have become central to Duke’s health enterprise, including the Duke Cancer Institute, the Duke Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, Duke Institute for Health Innovation and Innovations in Healthcare, a nonprofit housed within the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. With his wife, Ruth Cooper Dzau, he endowed DGHI’s Victor J. Dzau Distinguished Lecture in Global Health, which this year will be given by former U.S. AIDS Ambassador John Nkengasong as part of DGHI’s 20th anniversary symposium on Friday, Oct. 9.
As part of our ongoing celebration of DGHI’s 20th anniversary, we spoke with Dzau about his plans for his second Duke career and what it’s like now being part of an institute he helped create. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Dzau (second from left) with officials...
Why was it important to you to be involved with DGHI on your return to Duke?
First of all, I’m coming back to contribute. I think my North Star has always been making a difference, doing what I can to be useful. And I think this is a time when I can be helpful to DGHI. Through my leadership roles, and particularly the 12 years I spent directing the National Academy of Medicine, I’ve done a lot to support the kinds of work the institute focuses on – looking at financing, universal health coverage, pandemic risk assessment, preparedness, etc. For example, I co-chair the G20 high-level panel on pandemic financing, I serve on the WHO-World Bank Global Pandemic Monitoring Board, as well as the WHO Science Council, etc. I think I have a good platform to bring the right minds together to help us think about the future of global health funding, policy and leadership.
But the main reason is I think Duke’s an exciting place to be. I wanted to be in Trent Hall because I want to be around the young people who are so passionate about global health and whose work is so inspiring. It takes multiple generations of people working together to really make a difference, and at Duke, we have that.
How did your experiences with Paul Farmer shape your views on global health?
Global health has always been in my DNA. Growing up as a child in China and coming to this country as an immigrant, I’ve always had the awareness that there is more than the United States. But it was meeting [Partners in Health cofounders] Paul Farmer and Jim Kim that really ignited my fire for global health.
When I was coming back to Harvard from Stanford [in 1996], the chairman of the board told me about these two young guys on the faculty who were doing amazing things. So I met with them, and of course right away I was taken by what they were trying to do. What impressed me, beyond their passion for the work they were doing to deliver healthcare in Haiti, was their focus on equity. It was about providing good healthcare to everyone, no matter their circumstances, and this really resonated with me.
When I was chair, I witnessed a lot of our trainees and younger faculty using their elective time to go work with Paul and Jim in Haiti. It was inspiring to see, but I was concerned that there was no career path for them. It was kind of a dead end for them. There were no global health academic departments and no positions for them to work toward, except to go work for an NGO. It was clear to me we needed to create something sustainable, with a distinct mission and path for people who want to do global research, education and clinical care. So I created the Division of Global Health Equity within the Harvard Medical School Brigham Hospital. And that became very successful, and it really inspired me to want to do something around global health at Duke.
Dzau speaks at a meeting of global...
When did you sense there was an opportunity to do something similar at Duke?
As soon as I arrived, I started talking with people about global health. I realized there was a good amount of work already going on, but it was spread out across a lot of different departments. I kept thinking that we should bring all this work together. So we created the steering committee, which was chaired by [Duke medicine professors] Bart Haynes and Bob Cook-Deegan and had many faculty who are now part of DGHI involved, and they came back with the recommendation to start the institute.
The timing of all this was perfect, because in fall 2004, the students had just read “Mountains Beyond Mountains” [Tracy Kidder’s book about Paul Farmer], and Paul came back to campus to give a lecture in Page Auditorium. The students lined up to ask him to sign their books like he was a rock star. And it just seemed very compelling to do this at a university, not just within a hospital.
Talking about timing, the newly arrived Duke University President [Richard] Brodhead also had the vision of Duke as a global university. When I presented the idea of establishing the Duke Global Health Institute, he immediately embraced it. We, the university and Duke Health, combined resources and recruited Mike Merson as the inaugural director. The rest is history as the saying goes.
Dzau and Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,...
Has DGHI lived up to what you imagined two decades ago?
Oh, very much so. It’s clear DGHI is under great leadership, and you can sense the energy and enthusiasm. When I look at all the places DGHI is doing research, implementing solutions and scaling up innovations, I’d say it’s even broader than what we had imagined. It is reaching students across the university and bringing people together who can think about health issues from many different perspectives beyond medicine. Its impact is very comprehensive, and yet at the same time it is focused on some of our most critical problems, such as how countries in Africa and Asia deal with the health impacts of climate change.
I think there’s a lot of potential for DGHI to do even more in terms of policy engagement. If you look at something like AI, there’s a lot of really strong work going on about how AI can improve healthcare and how to scale up those innovations in countries and regions. But I’d like to see us take a more strategic approach, looking at how we advance and regulate AI on a global level – it has to be standardized for use everywhere, its use must be equitable and it should be contextualized and localized with data from each region.
Obviously, the environment for global health is a lot different in 2026 than it was in 2006. Do you still feel optimistic about the field and the impact Duke can make on it?
Yes, I really do. I think the challenges now are more a question of what is happening in the United States. But I think people still strongly believe in the importance of global engagement and working multilaterally to take on problems that affect us all. There’s no turning back on that.
You can look at what this administration has pulled back, but I think we’re also seeing that countries are taking a more active role, and there is new talk about health sovereignty. At the G20 panel I co-chair, there has been a lot of discussion about countries doing more to fund their health programs including HIV and pandemic preparedness and responses. They will need to mobilize more domestic resources, but we also need to help them grow their economies so they have more funds to be used to build health systems and resilience. DGHI can be an important voice in these discussions, and I hope we will.
