Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

Elias Zerhouni, who stepped down as director of the US National Institutes of Health in October, last week joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a senior fellow advising on global health issues. Zerhouni will work half-time for the $35-billion charity. An Algerian native who is a radiologist by training, he plans to return to imaging research in the other half of his time.

Zerhouni is taking the job with Gates “out of personal passion and interest,” he told Nature. “It’s a labour of love, not a labour of money.” (He declined to reveal his salary.) His focus will include an initiative tackling 14 “grand challenges in global health” ranging from development of single-dose vaccines to therapies for hidden infections.

Zerhouni was approached about the position in November by Tachi Yamada, the president of the foundation’s Global Health Program. “If you know Elias, it’s a natural evolution,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of NIH’s National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. “He has always – and much more intensely over the last few years – taken a keen interest in global health issues.”

Image: NIH