The Austin College community celebrates the many accomplishments of global health crusader Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., even as we mourn his death today, February 21, 2022. Farmer was the 2007 recipient of the Austin College Leadership Award, presented March 1 at Belo Mansion in Dallas. His nonprofit health organization, Partners in Health, announced that Farmer, 62, “unexpectedly passed away today in his sleep while in Rwanda.”
From Austin College Publicity at the Time of the 2007 Award:
(In 2007, the award had not yet been named for Lee Posey. It would later come to be known, as it is today, as the Austin College Posey Leadership Award.)
A Harvard professor, physician, and activist for international communities in need of healthcare, Farmer plans to apply the prize toward Partners In Health, the social justice organization he co-founded in 1987. The Austin College Leadership Award, which underscores the college’s emphasis on principles of servant leadership, was created to recognize outstanding individuals who apply leadership talents to make a positive impact on society through service to the local, national, or international community. Farmer’s dedication to providing medical care to the world’s poorest citizens led to his selection for the prestigious award.
Farmer is a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH), an organization created to build hospitals and provide health services and advocacy in areas of the world profoundly affected by poverty, violence, and epidemics of disease. The Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Farmer’s work focuses on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor and draws primarily on active clinical practice. He is medical director of a charity hospital, the Clinique Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti and attending physician in infectious diseases and chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston.