A life across two traditions of medicine.

Sanjiv Chopra was born in India in 1949, the younger son of a distinguished cardiologist who trained in the era when the EKG was new. He studied at St. Columba's School in Delhi and Hansraj College before earning his medical degree at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. In 1972 he came to the United States for postgraduate training, completed an internship in New Jersey, and moved to Boston in 1973.

After a residency and a fellowship in gastroenterology and hepatology, he joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1979, where he remains a Professor of Medicine. A hepatologist, he serves as Senior Consultant in Hepatology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is Editor-in-Chief of the hepatology section of UpToDate, the electronic textbook of medicine subscribed to by some two million clinicians in 195 countries, and served as the Marshall Wolf Distinguished Clinician Educator at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

A teacher of teachers

For twelve years Dr. Chopra served as Faculty Dean for Continuing Medical Education at Harvard Medical School, leading one of the most extensive academic CME enterprises in the world: programs reaching some 80,000 clinicians across more than 150 countries each year. His teaching has been recognized repeatedly, from early honors at Brigham and Women's Hospital to Harvard's own awards for excellence in the classroom, and in 2009 he was elected a Master of the American College of Physicians, one of the field's highest distinctions.

The scholarship

Dr. Chopra's scholarly work spans well over a hundred peer-reviewed publications in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and Gastroenterology, with particular depth in viral hepatitis, cirrhosis, liver biopsy technique, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition he has worked to bring to broader public attention.

Brotherhood

With his older brother, the author Deepak Chopra, he wrote Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream, a double memoir of two immigrants who pursued the American dream and took very different paths into medicine, one toward Western practice and one toward mind-body healing. The book traces a family shaped by a father's stethoscope and a mother's storytelling, and a journey from postwar Delhi to the top of American medicine.

A second calling

Over time, Dr. Chopra became an internationally sought speaker, lecturing in more than twenty-five countries on leadership, healthy living, happiness, and living with purpose. His talks draw on the lives of figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Florence Nightingale, and Winston Churchill, weaving medicine, history, and story into lectures that audiences carry home. He has written more than fifteen books on these themes, from clinical references to works on leadership and well-being for general readers; his seventeenth, From Splintered to Centered: 7 Dimensions for Navigating Your Soul, is forthcoming.