David Ansell, MD, MPH is the Senior Vice President for Community Health Equity at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and previously served as its Chief Medical Officer. He is an internal medicine physician, trained at Cook County Hospital in the late 1970s, where he spent seventeen years holding a number of positions including Chief of General Medicine/Primary Care. After leaving County, he spent ten years as Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, located in one of the highest hardship communities in Chicago.

He has been particularly involved in health equity work, bringing attention to higher rates of breast cancer mortality for African-American women in Chicago. In 2007 he co-founded the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce a not-for-profit that focuses on eliminating the racial disparities in breast cancer mortality.

He is the author of The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills (2017, University of Chicago Press); County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital (2011, Chicago Review Press); and numerous papers and book chapters on health disparities.