FAUCI
Anthony

• 1. Early life
• 2. Career
• 3. Personal life

Anthony Stephen Fauci  is an American physician and immunologist who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. Since January 2020, he has been one of the lead members of the Trump administration's White House Coronavirus Task Force addressing the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. In January 2021, he will become Chief Medical Advisor to the President in the Biden administration. Fauci is one of the world's leading experts on infectious diseases, and during the early stages of the pandemic, The New Yorker and The New York Times described Fauci as one of the most trusted medical figures in the United States.

Early life

Fauci was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to Stephen A. Fauci and Eugenia Abys Fauci, owners of a pharmacy. His father was a Columbia University–educated pharmacist, his mother and sister Denise worked the register, and Fauci delivered prescriptions. The pharmacy was located in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn, directly beneath the family apartment, previously in the Bensonhurst neighborhood.

Fauci's paternal grandparents, Antonino Fauci and Calogera Guardino, were from Sciacca, Italy. His maternal grandmother, Raffaella Trematerra, from Naples, Italy, was a seamstress. His maternal grandfather, Giovanni Abys, was born in Switzerland and was an artist, noted for landscape and portrait painting, magazine illustrations (Italy) as well as graphic design for commercial labels, including olive oil cans. His grandparents emigrated from Italy to the United States in the late 19th century. Fauci grew up Catholic, but now considers himself a humanist.

Fauci attended the Jesuit Regis High School in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where he captained the school's basketball team despite standing only 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m) tall. After graduating from high school in 1958, Fauci attended the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross, graduating in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics with a pre-med track. Fauci then attended medical school at Cornell University's Medical College (now Weill Cornell Medicine) where he graduated first in his class with a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1966. He completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (now Weill Cornell Medical Center).

Career

In 1968, Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI) at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In 1974, he became head of the Clinical Physiology Section, LCI, and in 1980 was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation. In 1984, he became director of NIAID, a position he still holds as of 2020. In that role he is responsible for an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research on infectious and immune-mediated illnesses. He has turned down several offers to lead his agency's parent, the NIH, and has been at the forefront of U.S. efforts to contend with viral diseases like HIV/AIDS, SARS, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, MERS, Ebola and COVID-19.

He played a significant role in the early 2000s in creating the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and in driving development of biodefense drugs and vaccines following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Fauci has been a visiting professor at many medical centers, and has received 30 honorary doctorates from universities in the U.S. and abroad.

Personal life

In 1985, Fauci married Christine Grady, a nurse and bioethicist with the NIH, after they met while treating a patient. Grady is chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. They have three adult daughters.