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World Bank selects new president

Jim Yong Kim will serve as the World Bank president for the next five years beginning on July 1, 2012

WASHINGTON, April 16 (Itar-Tass) —— The Executive Directors selected Jim Yong Kim as the new president of the World Bank Group on Monday, April 16.

Jim Yong Kim will serve as the World Bank president for the next five years beginning on July 1, 2012.

The president is the chairman of the Boards of Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA). He is also ex officio chairman of the Boards of Directors of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the Administrative Council of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

Jim Yong Kim is currently President of Dartmouth College. A U.S. national, Dr. Kim is a co-founder of Partners in Health (PIH) and a former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation (WHO). Before assuming the Dartmouth presidency, Dr. Kim held professorships at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He also served as chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and director of the Francois Xavier Bagnoud Centre for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, the World Bank said in a press release.

Born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, Kim moved with his family to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. Dr. Kim graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982. He earned a medical doctorate from Harvard Medical School in 1991 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1993. He is married to Younsook Lim, a pediatrician. They have two young sons.

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