An Indian-born physician Ashish Jha has been appointed the new White House COVID-19 response coordinator. He has replaced Jeff Zeints.

Jha is a leading health specialist within the US and he has been recognized for his knowledgeable and calming public presence. He is a communicable disease expert and also the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.

He has worked on the filovirus and served as co-chair of a panel to combat the disease’s breakout in West Africa in 2014.

Jha also offered his advice to the White House on Zients and his team’s national COVID-19 readiness strategy, which was published earlier this month. It explains how people can gradually resume normal activities once the restrictions imposed thanks to Covid are eased.

Jha was born in Bihar in 1970. He migrated to Canada in 1979, and to the US in 1983. He also had done his general medical fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and earned his master of public health degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2004.

He formerly served as the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and taught at Harvard graduate school and therefore the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

His work focused on improving the US healthcare systems, with over 200 empirical papers to his name. From 2009 to 2013, he worked for the department of veterans affairs also with great interest as a special assistant to the secretary.