15th Director of the National Institutes of Health
Author, Disease Knows No Politics

Dr. Elias Zerhouni served as the 15th director of the NIH under President George W. Bush and as a presidential envoy for science and technology under President Barack Obama. Dr. Zerhouni has worked as a global health research senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and served as president of research and development at Sanofi, a multinational pharmaceutical giant.

Dr. Zerhouni’s forthcoming book, Disease Knows No Politics (July 2025) is a timely, inspirational medical and political memoir that champions the American Dream and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), while recounting his extraordinary immigrant journey.  For more information and to preorder the book, please click the following link to visit the book’s website: Dr. Elias Zerhouni | Disease Knows No Politics

Dr. Zerhouni, who is currently Professor Emeritus Radiology and Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, also served as Chair of the Department of Radiology and Executive Vice Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is the author of more than 200 publications, and an inventor whose research has saved countless patients with suspected lung or breast cancer from unnecessary surgeries and advanced the field of cardiovascular MRI. Dr. Zerhouni is President of OPKO Health, a multinational biopharmaceutical and diagnostics company, and co-founder of OPKO’s ModeX Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on developing innovative, multispecific biologic drugs for cancer and infectious diseases. He is a board member for the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, the Lasker Foundation, and Research!America. He’s an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the Legion of Honour medal from the French National Order.

Dr. Zerhouni, a former vice chair of radiology at EVMS, spent formative years of his radiology career at the institution, conducting groundbreaking research in high-resolution CT and developing new methods of CT densitometry. More recently, Dr. Zerhouni was a commencement speaker for EVMS in 2022, and he played a key role in the EVMS/ODU merger. Dr. Zerhouni first appeared at The Norfolk Forum in 2009.