Profiles in Leadership is a series of interviews with leaders in fields such as health care, community organizing, international development, and homelessness prevention. The series, which aims to help health professions students reflect on their own leadership journeys, is a project of the IHI Open School for Health Professions and was made possible with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Jeffrey Sachs
Director, The Earth Institute, Columbia University
Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine. In the 1980s and 1990s, Sachs advised the governments of several Latin American and Eastern European countries (including Bolivia, Poland, and Russia) on a wide range of issues, prompting The New York Times Magazine to call him "probably the most important economist in the world."

If you are unable to watch the videos below, watch them on YouTube.