42 President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton

William Jefferson Clinton was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. As a delegate to Boys Nation while in high school, he met President John Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden. The encounter led him to enter a life of public service. Clinton graduated from Georgetown University and in 1968 won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He received a law degree from Yale University in 1973, and shortly thereafter entered politics in Arkansas.

He was defeated in his campaign for Congress in Arkansas's Third District in 1974. The next year he married Hillary Rodham, a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School. In 1980, Chelsea, their only child, was born. Clinton was elected Arkansas Attorney General in 1976, and won the governorship in 1978. After losing a bid for a second term, he regained the office four years later, and served until his 1992 bid for the Presidency of the United States.

Elected President of the United States in 1992, and again in 1996, President Clinton was the first Democratic president to be awarded a second term in six decades. Under his leadership, the United States enjoyed the strongest economy in a generation and the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. President Clinton’s core values of building community, creating opportunity, and demanding responsibility resulted in unprecedented progress for America, including moving the nation from record deficits to record surpluses; the creation of over 22 million jobs—more than any other administration; low levels of unemployment, poverty and crime; and the highest homeownership and college enrollment rates in history.

President Clinton’s accomplishments in the White House include increasing investment in education, providing tax relief for working families, helping millions of Americans move from welfare to work, expanding access to technology, encouraging investment in underserved communities, protecting the environment, countering the threat of terrorism and promoting peace and strengthening democracy around the world. His Administration’s economic policies fostered the largest peacetime economic expansion in history. President Clinton previously served as the Governor of Arkansas, chairman of the National Governors’ Association and Attorney General of Arkansas. As former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, he is one of the original architects and leading advocates of the Third Way movement.

Since 2001, President Clinton has dedicated himself to philanthropy and continued public service through the William J. Clinton Foundation, which is focused on finding practical and measurable solutions to address pressing challenges at home and abroad. In addition to his Foundation work, President Clinton joined with former President Bush to help with relief and recovery following the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and to lead a nationwide fundraising effort in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He also served as U.N. Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery from 2005 to 2007.

Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D.

Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to improving health care for the world's poorest people. In August 2009, Dr. Farmer was appointed by the UN Secretary-General as the Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti. In this capacity, he will support President Clinton and the people of Haiti in the implementing the Government of Haiti’s long term goals and priorities.

Dr. Farmer is a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH, 1987), an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 when still a student, working with villages in Haiti’s Central Plateau. Over the past twenty years, PIH has expanded operations to ten sites throughout Haiti, as well as nine other countries around the globe. The work has become a model for health care for poor communities worldwide: Dr. Farmer and his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad have pioneered novel community-based treatment strategies that successfully show that quality health care can be delivered in resource-poor settings.

Dr Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University where he is a professor of Social Medicine and the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is a widely published author of numerous books and articles on health and human rights and social inequality. He is the subject of Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder's bestseller Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, which chronicles the development of Dr. Farmer's work in Haiti and beyond.

Dr. Farmer is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award.” He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and has recently been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.