Quality Talks 2021: Dr. Dave A. Chokshi & the Race to Vaccination in New York City

Dr. Dave A. Chokshi is the commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Dr. Chokshi most recently served as Chief Population Health Officer at NYC Health + Hospitals, where he built and grew an award-winning team dedicated to health system improvement, spanning innovative care models and analytics, primary care transformation, social determinants of health, community-based care management and chronic diseases and prevention. He has taken care of patients as a primary care physician at Bellevue Hospital since 2014.

Dr. Chokshi’s prior work experience spans the public, private and nonprofit sectors, including positions with the New York City and State Departments of Health and the Louisiana Department of Health, before and after Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Chokshi served on the FEMA delegation to New York City after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. He also served as a White House Fellow and was the principal health advisor to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Dr. Chokshi has written widely on public health and medicine including in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Lancet, Health Affairs, Science and Scientific American. In 2016, President Obama appointed him to the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion and Integrative and Public Health.

He trained in internal medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, where he received the Dunne Award for Compassionate Care, and was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School. During his training, Dr. Chokshi did clinical work in Guatemala, Peru, Botswana, Ghana and India. He received his M.D. with Alpha Omega Alpha distinction from Penn, where he was elected by his peers to win the Joel Gordon Miller Prize. He also earned an MSc in global public health as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and graduated summa cum laude from Duke.