Dr. Paul Farmer, global health and human rights advocate and co-founder of Partners In Health, will be in Seattle next week for a free public event at the University of Washington.

By the time he gets here, he may have decided to take a new job with the Obama Administration.

Farmer will speak about the current climate of global health in a conversation moderated by Dr. Chris Elias, the CEO of PATH. Farmer is the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Mountains Beyond Mountains." A conversation with him seems like a tonic for despair and apathy -- he's brutally honest about the disparity he sees, but people still come away feeling optimistic they can do something about it.

I had a chance to meet him a couple of years ago and ask him about his work.

MOUPALI DAS

Paul Farmer will speak at UW's Kane Hall on Thursday at 6 p.m..

In Seattle, he'll talk about the future of global health delivery, the challenge of multi drug-resistant tuberculosis, and how one person has the ability to make a significant contribution to global health. More details are here.

Farmer is the chair of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and an associate chief at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He also spends time shuttling between PIH projects in Rwanda and Haiti. There have been suggestions recently that he will be named to a top post at USAID, which would signal a radical shift for that organization.

Arguing that health care is a human right, Farmer approaches ill health as a symptom of deeper issues of poverty and inequality. But he also expresses ambivalence.

"I move uneasily between the obligation to intervene and the troubling knowledge that much of the work we do, praised as humanitarian or charitable, does not always lead us closer to our goal," he said in a recent NPR feature. His goal? "Nothing less than the refashioning of our world."