Alan M. Garber, MD, PhD became Provost of Harvard University in September 2011. He is also the Mallinckrodt Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and a Professor of Public Policy in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Professor Garber graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, and went on to earn AM and PhD degrees in Economics from Harvard University. He earned his MD with research honours from Stanford University in 1983, and completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Before becoming the Provost at Harvard University, Professor Garber was the Henry J. Kaiser Jr. Professor and a Professor of Medicine, as well as a Professor of Economics, Health Research and Policy, and Economics in the Graduate School of Business (by courtesy) at Stanford University.  He also served as Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research at Stanford, and as a Staff Physician at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System.

Professor Garber is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy at the National Academies.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Royal College of Physicians.  

He is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and served as founding Director of its Health Care Program for nineteen years.  He has also served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Ageing at the National Institutes of Health; as a member of the Board of Health Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office; and as Chair of the Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Professor Garber's research is directed toward methods for improving health care delivery and financing, particularly for the elderly, in settings of limited resources. His work addresses such issues as technology evaluation, comparative effectiveness, the causes of health expenditure growth, and health care productivity

The Nuffield Trust designated Professor Garber as a Rock Carling Fellow in 2009. As part of his fellowship, he studied incentives to improve clinical and organisational performance in the NHS, particularly in the area of integrated care.

His work, published in the Nuffield Trust Viewpoint: Competition, integration and incentives: the quest for efficiency in the English NHS (December 2011), provides an expert view on the question of how best to balance incentives to promote innovation in the NHS.