U.S. President Barack Obama is set to nominate Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank, senior administration official said.
Kim will join Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and U.S. development economist Jeffrey Sachson a list of nominees who would need to be approved by the World Bank board of member countries.
The United States has held the presidency of the World Bank since the institution's founding after World War Two.
Following are five facts about Kim:
- Kim has an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard. He received a coveted MacArthur grant in 2003.
- Kim was born in 1959 in South Korea, moved with his family to the United States at age 5 and grew up inMuscatine, Iowa. His father, a dentist, taught at the University of Iowa.
- He was quarterback of the Muscatine High School football team, and was also class president and valedictorian, ranking tops academically in the graduating class.
- Kim was director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization. He developed a key treatment for a form of drug-resistant tuberculosis while working in Peru in the mid-1990s.
- He was executive director of Partners in Health (PIH), which serves impoverished communities in Haiti,Peru, and elsewhere. He co-founded the organization Partners in Health with Paul Farmer, who was a classmate at Harvard Medical School. The work of PIH received wide publicity through the book "Mountains Beyond Mountains."
SOURCE Reuters
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