Anthony S. Fauci, who retired from the National Institutes of Health in December after helping two presidents navigate the coronavirus pandemic, plans to join the faculty at Georgetown University on July 1, according to the university.
Fauci, 82, will teachmedicine and public policy as a “distinguished university professor,” a title that recognizes “extraordinary achievement in scholarship, teaching and service,”Georgetown said in a statement released Monday.
Fauci, a world authority on infectious disease who advised seven presidents on crises from AIDS to Ebola to the coronavirus, will teach in both the School of Medicine and the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown officials said. Fauci stepped down after 38 years as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in December.
“I ask myself, now at this stage in my life, what do I have to offer to society? And I think, sure, I could do more experiments in the lab and have my lab going. But given what I’ve been through, I think what I have to offer is experience and inspiration to the younger generation of students,” Fauci said in an interview with Georgetown posted Monday on the school’s website.
Fauci declined to comment, through his attorney, Robert Barnett.
Fauci has deep ties to the 234-year-old Jesuit institution. He and his wife, Christine Grady, a Georgetown graduate and head of the NIH Clinical Center’s Department of Bioethics, were married in the campus’s Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart. Their three daughters were born at Georgetown University Hospital. Fauci attended New York City’s Regis High School and the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., both Jesuit institutions.
Fauci joined NIH in 1968 as a 27-year-old rising star, became one of the most cited researchers in history and eventually grew NIAID’s budget from$350 million to $6 billion. He was a leading researcher of HIV and its treatment and one of the architects of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which distributes anti-HIV medication in developing countries. In 2008, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He advised the government on the 2001 anthrax scare and the Zika outbreak of 2015 and 2016. But it was the coronavirus that would bring him worldwide fame and make him the primary target of opponents of restrictions designed to quell the pandemic.
He faced death threats and was assigned a security detail. His children were harassed. Donald Trump, the president Fauci was serving under when the virus first swept the planet, soon joined the chorus of misinformation and condemnation as Fauci and a handful of experts stressed public health principles that Trump believed were battering the economy during his unsuccessful fight for reelection.