Dr Mushtaque Chowdhury has been elected as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of DBH Finance PLC.

The decision was made at the 149th meeting of the Board of Directors of the company, said a press release issued on Thursday.

Dr Chowdhury was the Vice Chair of BRAC, the world’s largest non-governmental organisation.

He is a Professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University in New York.

During 2009-12, he worked as the Senior Adviser and Acting Managing Director for the Rockefeller Foundation.

He also served as a MacArthur Fellow at Harvard University.

In recent times, he worked for the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA as a Visiting Scholar.

He was the founding Dean of the Brac University James P Grant School of Public Health.

Dr Chowdhury holds a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA (Hon’s.) from the University of Dhaka.

Dr Chowdhury was a coordinator of the UN Millennium Task Force on Child Health and Maternal Health, set up by the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

He is a co-recipient of the ‘Innovator of the Year 2006’ award from the Marriott Business School of Brigham Young University in USA. In 2017, he received the ‘Medical Excellence’ award from the Chicago-based Ronald McDonald House Charities.

Dr Chowdhury has published over 150 articles in peer-reviewed international journals and also received the ‘Best Impactful Book’ award given by the University Press Limited. His biography, “Amar Brac Jibon” was recently published by Prothoma.

Dr Chowdhury is a founder of the Bangladesh Education Watch and Bangladesh Health Watch, two civil society watchdogs on education and health, respectively.

He is on the boards and committees of several organisations and initiatives, including BRAC University, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), Social Marketing Company, London School of Economics and the Management Sciences for Health (MSH).

He has been a Director of DBH, nominated by BRAC, since February 2015.