Rahul Gupta

Rahul Gupta, MD, MPH, MBA, FACP, is the Senior Vice President and Chief Medical and Health Officer at March of Dimes, the nation’s leader in mom and baby health.

In his role, Dr. Gupta provides strategic oversight for March of Dimes medical and public health efforts to improve the health of all moms and babies.

Before joining the March of Dimes, Dr. Gupta served under two Governors as the West Virginia’s Health Commissioner. As the Chief Health Officer, he led the state’s opioid crisis response efforts and launched a number of pioneering public health initiatives such as the Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome Birthscore program to identify high-risk infants. His efforts have also led to historic declines in smoking during pregnancy in the state.

Dr. Gupta, a specialist in internal medicine and preventive medicine, served as an academic faculty in Tennessee and Alabama before moving to West Virginia originally in 2009 to lead the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department. He is also adjunct professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Leadership in the School of Public Health at West Virginia University and visiting faculty at TH Chan Harvard School of Public Health.

A global thought leader and a driver of innovative public policies on health issues critical to moms, babies, and families, Dr. Gupta is an advisor to several nonprofit organizations and task forces on local, national and international public health policy and programs. He currently serves on the National Advisory Council for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, as an ad hoc member of the Task Force on Research Specific to Pregnant Women and Lactating Women, and on the Steering Committee for the National Center for Fatality Review and Prevention. He was a peer reviewer and editorial board member for scientific journals and for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and has published over 125 peer-reviewed articles. Amongst numerous teaching and service awards and honors, he received the 2015 Milton and Ruth Roemer Prize for Creative Local Public Health Work by the American Public Health Association and was named “2017 West Virginians of the Year” by the Charleston Gazette-Mail. In 2018, Dr. Gupta was named Public Official of the Year by the Governing Magazine.

Dr. Gupta was born in India and grew up in Maryland and the suburbs of Washington, D.C., the son of an Indian diplomat. At age 21, he completed medical school at University of Delhi, and subsequently did his internship and residency at St. Joseph Hospital, Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. He earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of Alabama-Birmingham and a global master’s of business administration degree from the London School of Business and Finance.