Dr. Gounder is an internist, infectious disease specialist, epidemiologist, and medical journalist.

Dr. Gounder is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. She cares for patients on the wards at Bellevue Hospital Center and at Indian Health Service and tribal health facilities across the country.

Dr. Gounder is the CEO/President/Founder of Just Human Productions, a non-profit multimedia organization. She’s also the host and producer of American Diagnosis, a podcast on health and social justice, and Epidemic, a podcast about the SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 / coronavirus epidemic, which she co-hosts with former U. S. Ebola czar Ron Klain.

She’s a CNN Medical Analyst, and prior to that, was a frequent expert guest on CNN, MSNBC, HLN, Al Jazeera America, CBS, BBC, MTV, Dr. Oz, and Oprah Prime. She's written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian US, The Washington Post, Reuters, Quartz, Sports Illustrated, and Bloomberg View. She’s best known for her coverage of the Ebola, Zika, COVID-19, opioid overdose, and gun violence epidemics.

In early 2015, Dr. Gounder spent two months volunteering as an Ebola aid worker in Guinea. In her free time, she interviewed locals to understand how the crisis was affecting them. She is currently making Dying to Talk, a feature-length documentary about the Ebola epidemic in Guinea.

Dr. Gounder is a consultant for TEDMED and on TEDMED’s Editorial Advisory Board. And she serves on the Executive Committee of the New York City COVID-19 Rapid Response Coalition, which seeks to extend treatment and services to high-risk, chronically ill and underserved New Yorkers in need of at-home care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between 1998 and 2012, she studied TB and HIV in South Africa, Lesotho, Malawi, Ethiopia and Brazil. While on faculty at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Gounder was the Director for Delivery for the Gates Foundation-funded Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic. She later served as Assistant Commissioner and Director of the Bureau of Tuberculosis Control at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

She received her BA in Molecular Biology from Princeton University, her Master of Science in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her MD from the University of Washington. Dr. Gounder was an intern and resident in Internal Medicine at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, and a post-doctoral fellow in Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University. She was elected a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2016 and featured in the IDSA’s 2017 Annual Report. In 2017, People Magazine named her one of 25 Women Changing the World.

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