Lincoln Chen

Lincoln C. Chen is the Director of the Global Equity Center at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Before arriving at Harvard, he served as the Executive Vice President for Strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition to providing strategic guidance for Rockefeller's worldwide programs in food, health, work, culture, and global policies, Dr. Chen also served as a member of the Board of Trustees Committee on Future Strategies and chairs or directs programs in global philanthropy, such as the Program Venture Experiment and the Bellagio Committee.

For a decade before joining the Rockefeller Foundation in January 1997, Dr. Chen was the Director of the University-wide Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and the Taro Takemi Professor of International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. From 1981 - 1987, Dr. Chen was the Representative of the Ford Foundation in India, and in 1973 - 1980, he worked for the Ford Foundation both on its staff and seconded as Scientific Director of the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh.

Dr. Chen has BA from Princeton University, MPH from Johns Hopkins, and MD from Harvard Medical school. He was trained in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Chen has more than 100 publications on world social development, especially in health, population, and food and nutrition. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served in numerous scientific panels of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council.

In 2001, Dr. Chen was elected Chair of the Board of Directors of CARE, America's largest non-governmental organization working overseas and was appointed a Commisioner of the independent Global Commission on Human Security. He advises several foundations, the World Bank, and UN agencies. He is a regular technical advisor to the annual Human Development Report of the UNDP and currently serves as a Board member of the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships (Ted Turner's UN Foundation counterpart). Dr. Chen is also an advisory committee member of the Synergos Institute and the Center of Economic and Social Rights in New York City, and the Center for Sciences and the Environment in Washington, DC. He has appeared on McNeil-Lehrer PBS News Hour, ABC's Nightline, and other news media outlets.