Atul Gawande is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is also Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1998. He has written three best-selling books: “Complications,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002; “Better,” which was selected as one of the ten best books of 2007 by Amazon.com; and “The Checklist Manifesto.” He has won two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for the highest research impact on health care, and a MacArthur Fellowship, and he has been named one of the hundred most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy and Time.