Jerome Adams

In 2015, an outbreak of HIV tied to needle-sharing among users of crushed prescription painkillers tore through rural Scott County, Indiana. Jerome Adams, then the state's health commissioner, called for a clean needle exchange program. The call was controversial, and Adams persuaded Governor Mike Pence to authorize one. Public health accounts later credited the exchange with helping slow the outbreak.

Adams is an anesthesiologist, born in 1974, with a medical degree from Indiana University and a master's in public health from UC Berkeley. As Indiana health commissioner from 2014 to 2017, he oversaw agency responses to the HIV outbreak, a lead-contamination crisis, and outbreaks of Ebola and Zika.

On September 5, 2017, he was sworn in as the twentieth U.S. surgeon general. In office he issued the Surgeon General's Call to Action to Control Hypertension, a document urging Americans and their doctors to treat high blood pressure as the serious, widespread condition it is. He also spoke from personal experience: his younger brother has struggled with addiction and has been incarcerated. "One of the most frustrating things is being surgeon general of the United States and feeling like you can't help your own brother," he told STAT News in 2017. He said he shared his family's struggle "to show that Americans across the political spectrum suffer from addiction, and that addiction can happen to anyone."

While in office, he spoke plainly about the country's racial fault lines. In June 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, he told Axios that the man who died could have been him, drawing on his own experience as a Black man and calling for attention to the health and social conditions behind such deaths.

When Adams joined Purdue in October 2021, he wanted the university's health work to reach further into rural Indiana. He proposed working through Purdue Extension and with business leaders, treating health as a concern for communities and workplaces alike. These were the priorities he set out as Purdue's first executive director of health equity initiatives, a role he continues to hold alongside his work as a practicing anesthesiologist and distinguished professor.