Celine Gounder is a practicing HIV/infectious diseases specialist and internist, epidemiologist (aka disease detective), journalist, filmmaker and storyteller. Dr. Gounder is the host and producer of “In Sickness and in Health,” a podcast on health and social justice. She’s written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian US, The Washington Post, Reuters, Quartz, Sports Illustrated and Bloomberg View. She’s a frequent expert guest on MSNBC, CNN, HLN, Al Jazeera America, CBS, BBC, MTV and Oprah Prime. She’s covered everything from Ebola and Zika to the opioid overdose crisis and gun violence. She was named one of People Magazine’s 25 Women Changing the World in 2017.
Gounder is on the faculty of the New York University School of Medicine and cares for patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Over the past two years, Dr. Gounder has been on an “ill-health tour” of the US, caring for patients in disease hotspots throughout the country – everywhere from Indian reservations to Appalachia. In early 2015, Dr. Gounder spent two months volunteering as an Ebola aid worker in Guinea. In her free time, she interviewed locals to understand how the crisis was affecting them. She is currently making “Dying to Talk,” a featurelength documentary about the Ebola epidemic in Guinea. Dr. Gounder is also a consultant for TEDMED, is on TEDMED’s Editorial Advisory Board and has served as a TEDMED co-host.
Between 1998 and 2012, she studied TB and HIV in South Africa, Lesotho, Malawi, Ethiopia and Brazil. While on faculty at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Gounder was the Director for Delivery for the Gates Foundation-funded Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic (CREATE). She later served as Assistant Commissioner and Director of the Bureau of Tuberculosis Control at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Gounder received her BA in Molecular Biology from Princeton University, her Master of Science in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her MD from the University of Washington. Dr. Gounder was an intern and resident in Internal Medicine at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, and a post-doctoral fellow in Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University. She was elected a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2016.