Anthony Fauci joins the Georgetown University faculty
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who was the federal government’s top infectious disease specialist for nearly 40 years and played a key role in leading 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 after serving as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. He was also President Biden’s top Covid adviser, a role he had held under President Donald J. Trump. Georgetown announced his new job on Monday.
Dr. Fauci will work at Georgetown’s School of Medicine and the McCourt School of Public Policy, the university said. A spokeswoman for Georgetown did not immediately respond to a request for details on what courses he will teach. The university’s announcement said that the role of Dr. Fauci at the School of Medicine will be in an infectious disease department focused on education, research and patient care.
At the NIH, Dr. Fauci has spent decades overseeing research on established infectious diseases – including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria – and emerging diseases such as Ebola, Zika and Covid-19. He was also a key architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a program that has provided life-saving treatments to more than 20 million people in 54 countries since it began 20 years ago under President George W. Bush.
Dr. Fauci was already a top public health official when the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020. But the race to understand and respond to the virus soon pushed him to the forefront of American life. Appearing regularly at White House briefings, he became a larger-than-life personality advising calm for an anxious nation.
He also polarized. Because his work often put him in the awkward position of publicly contradicting Mr. Trump, he became an enemy of the political right and a hero of the left.
In an interview with The New York Times last year, Dr. Fauci that he was “entirely apolitical” and “didn’t like it nor was he looking for a position to publicly contradict a president of the United States”.
“The far right seems to think I did that on purpose and enjoyed it,” he said. “I do not have.”
When Dr. Fauci retired last year, he said he hoped to do some public speaking, write a memoir, join a university and treat patients as if they had a medical center.
As for the memoir, Dr. Fauci told The Times he hoped to write a “real” memoir that told the story of his life, not just his turn in the national spotlight during the pandemic.
“I’d much rather tell a story about myself, from growing up on the streets of Brooklyn to where I am today,” he said. ‘But I do not know. I’ve never written a book.”