Surgeon, bestselling author and MacArthur Foundation "genius" Atul Gawande will lead the new company being formed by Amazon.com Inc, Berkshire Hathaway Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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"I'm thrilled to be named CEO of this health-care initiative," Gawande, who starts on July 9, said in a statement.

"I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better health-care delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world."

"Now I have the backing of these remarkable organizations to pursue this mission with even greater impact for more than a million people, and in doing so incubate better models of care for all. This work will take time but must be done," he said.

Here are some of the lesser knows facts about the multifaceted Gawande:

Apart from his name, lineage and appearance, there is barely anything that really connects Gawande to India. He was born in Brooklyn to Maharashtrian parents—both doctors—who had migrated to the US.

Although he never lived in India, his upbringing did have some Indian traits. “Like all Indian parents, there was an expectation that we would get good grades,” he had told The Independent in an interview in 2011.

Gawande’s wife, Kathleen Hobson is a former comparative literature major who has worked in book publishing and in magazines.

Gawande has been one of America's foremost authorities on health-care for years. He is a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, and he practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

The 52-year old surgeon rose to prominence among healthcare policy experts with a 2009 New Yorker article, The Cost Conundrum, that examined why health care was vastly more expensive in some parts of the US than others.

He has written several other books books such as, Com­plications, Better (in which he tells India’s polio eradication story) and The Checklist Manifesto.

In 2006, Gawande, who was 40 at the time, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. The foundation said he had “applied a critical eye to surgical practices” and scrutinized “the culture, protocol, and technology of modern medical practice from the perspective of a dedicated and empathetic professional.