A discussion with Mark Suzman, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, moderated by Helene Cooper, Pentagon correspondent for NYT.

Mark Suzman is CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He leads the organization in service of its vision – to help every person have the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life. Being raised in apartheid South Africa instilled in Mark a desire to use the advantages afforded to him to help tackle injustice and inequality. He began his career doing that through journalism, writing for the Johannesburg Star and then the Financial Times, where he covered international trade policy, welfare reform, and political issues, including the historic 1994 election of Nelson Mandela. In 2000, Mark joined the United Nations, where he was part of the effort to implement the Millennium Development Goals under the leadership of then Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Mark joined the Foundation in 2007 as director of Global Development Policy, Advocacy, and Special Initiatives. Prior to becoming CEO, Mark served as managing director of Country Offices, president of Global Policy and Advocacy, and chief strategy officer. He holds a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent with The New York Times. She joined the paper in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor, before becoming diplomatic correspondent in 2006 and White House correspondent in 2009. In 2015, she was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, for her work in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic. She is also the winner of of the George Polk award for health reporting (2015) and the Overseas Press Club Award (2015). She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood (Simon and Schuster, 2008), a memoir of growing up in Monrovia, Liberia, as well as Madame President: The Extraordinary Story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Simon and Schuster, 2017).