The Honorable Alex M. Azar II

Alex Azar has extensive healthcare experience in the senior-most levels of the U.S. government and the private sector. He is currently an advisor to Foresite Capital, an Adjunct Professor of Business and Senior Executive-in-Residence at the University of Miami Herbert Business School, and he is a member of the American Task Force on Lebanon’s Policy Advisory Board. He serves on several corporate boards.

Azar served as the 24th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS - 2018-2021), leading over 85,000 employees with a budget of over $1.4 trillion. He was the architect of Operation Warp Speed, delivering COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics and led the historic transformation of the healthcare system and HHS’s response to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. He drove U.S. Government efforts to tackle the opioid crisis, increase private insurance options, bring transparency of price and quality information to healthcare, expand telehealth, and give patients ownership of their health records. Azar also led key public health initiatives, such as banning flavored e-cigarettes, reducing youth tobacco use by nearly one-third in one year, creating and implementing the program to end the HIV epidemic in America in 10 years, responding to public health threats, crafting the first rural health initiative to improve access and quality of care, and launching a program to dramatically reduce maternal mortality.

He was President of Lilly USA, LLC from 2012 to 2017. Prior to that, Azar was the Deputy Secretary of HHS.