The Aspen Institute

Featuring Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University and former Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI), in conversation with Amna Nawaz, senior national correspondent and primary substitute anchor for PBS NewsHour. More than a year after the emergence of COVID-19, where does America stand in terms of public health?

Ashish K. Jha, M.D., M.P.H., is recognized globally as an expert on pandemic preparedness and response as well as on health policy research and practice. He has led groundbreaking research around Ebola and is now on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, leading national and international analysis of key issues and advising state and federal policy makers. Dr. Jha has published more than two hundred original research publications in prestigious journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the BMJ, and is a frequent contributor to a range of public media. He has extensively researched how to improve the quality and reduce the cost of health care, focusing on the impact of public health policy nationally and around the globe. Dr. Jha is currently the Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University. Before that, he was a faculty member at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School since 2005. He was the Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and also served as the Dean for Global Strategy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Amna Nawaz joined PBS NewsHour in April 2018 and serves as senior national correspondent and primary substitute anchor. Prior to joining the NewsHour, Nawaz was an anchor and correspondent at ABC News, anchoring breaking news coverage and leading the network’s digital coverage of the 2016 presidential election. Before that, she served as a foreign correspondent at NBC News, reporting from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, and the broader region. She is also the founder and former managing editor of NBC’s Asian America platform, built to elevate the voices of America’s fastest-growing population. In 2019, her reporting as part of a NewsHour series on the global plastic problem was the recipient of a Peabody Award. Nawaz has also been honored with an Emmy Award for the NBC News Special “Inside the Obama White House,” a Society for Features Journalism Award, and was a recipient of the International Reporting Project fellowship in 2009. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where she captained the varsity field hockey team, and later earned her master’s degree from the London School of Economics. She lives with her husband and two daughters in the Washington, D.C. area.