Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya is director of the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya previously was a professor at Stanford Medicine and held appointments at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute and Stanford’s Hoover Institution and economics department. His research focused on population aging and chronic disease, particularly on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Before Stanford, he was an economist at the RAND Corporation and a visiting economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published over 170 research papers and authored a leading textbook on health economics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for opening schools and lifting lockdowns while better protecting older populations who were most vulnerable to the disease. He earlier conducted research at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the SPHERE Institute.