(PORTLAND, Ore.)—The Saward Lecture series is pleased to present Dr. Atul Gawande, on Wednesday, September 23, 2009. Dr. Gawande will speak at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon, at 7:30 pm. Free to the public, the Saward Lecture has been hosted for 19 years by Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research as a means of benefiting the community.

Dr. Gawande is a surgeon and the author of Complications, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002. His most recent book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, is a New York Times bestseller and one of Amazon.com’s ten best books of 2007.

He is a staff member of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and The New Yorker magazine. Dr. Gawande is also Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Associate Director for the BWH Center for Surgery and Public Health.

After receiving his BAS from Stanford University, Dr. Gawande earned an MA (in politics, philosophy, and economics) from Oxford University, his MD from Harvard Medical School, and his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. He served as a senior health policy advisor in the Clinton presidential campaign and in the Clinton White House from 1992 to 1993.

Since 1998, he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is the director of the World Health Organization’s Global Challenge for Safer Surgical Care. In 2006, Dr. Gawande received the MacArthur Award for his research and writing.

Hosted by the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, the Saward Lecture series is named for Dr. Ernie Saward (1914–89), the founding medical director of KPNW, who retired in 1970. Dr. Gawande, who will be the 19th Saward Lecturer, joins a long list of esteemed leaders who have shared their visions of the social mission of medicine.

Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research, founded in 1964, is a non-profit research institution whose mission is advancing knowledge to improve health. It has research sites in Portland OR; Honolulu, HI; and Atlanta, GA.  www.kpchr.org>

To request tickets, please send your name, title, organization, mailing address and number of tickets requested to mary.l.harper@kpchr.org. Tickets are given out on a first-come, first-served basis. There is no charge to attend.