Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD
Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD, joined the board of the Child Mind Institute in 2025. He is a physician, epidemiologist, and transformative leader dedicated to improving health outcomes and advancing mental health care. From 2022 to 2025, he served as the 44th Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. During his tenure, he guided the city through the COVID-19 recovery and launched HealthyNYC, a legally embedded citywide plan to increase life expectancy and reduce health inequities for all New Yorkers. He also led transformative investments in mental health, including the expansion of community clubhouse programs for serious mental illness, presiding over the largest drop in overdose deaths in a decade. He invested in innovative programs for youth mental health, such as NYC TeenSpace, which serves tens of thousands of local teens with digital mental health supports, and led the lawsuit against four top social media companies for their negative impacts on youth mental health. He also made healthcare affordability a major focus, leading efforts to eliminate $2 billion in medical debt for New Yorkers and creating the Office of Healthcare Accountability to transparently publish hospital prices in New York City.
Previously, Dr. Vasan was president and CEO of Fountain House, a leading national nonprofit providing health, housing, education, and employment services to people with serious mental illness, where he oversaw its national expansion, including bringing in new funding from MacKenzie Scott and the Ford Foundation. In the first decade of his career, he worked in global health and HIV/AIDS with Partners in Health and the World Health Organization, living in Rwanda, Uganda, India, South Africa, and elsewhere to expand access to care.
Dr. Vasan is currently a Senior Fellow in Health Policy and Global Affairs at Yale University, after serving on the medical and public health faculty at Columbia University since 2014 and training in internal medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. He is also an Operating Partner at Commonweal Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on the intersection of government and technology. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Milken Institute and inseparable. He previously served on the boards of the Greater New York Hospital Association, NYC Health + Hospitals, and the New York Academy of Medicine. A Chicago native with roots in Chennai, India, Dr. Vasan holds a BA in economics from UCLA, an MS in epidemiology from Harvard, an MD from the University of Michigan, and a PhD from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
