Stanford-trained physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya has been officially named the next director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by President-elect Donald Trump.

Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post, writing, “I am thrilled to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, as Director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bhattacharya will work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the country’s medical research and make important discoveries that improve health and save lives.”

Bhattacharya met this week with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed by Trump to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH and other health agencies, and impressed the former presidential candidate with his ideas for overhauling the NIH. which, according to a Washington Post report, oversees biomedical research in the United States.

The NIH also provides grants to hundreds of thousands of researchers, oversees clinical trials at its Maryland campus, and supports various drug and therapeutic development efforts.

The nominee for NIH director must be confirmed by the Senate, which will have a Republican majority starting in January.

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Stanford-trained physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya is reportedly the presumptive favorite to be President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination as the next director of the NIH. (Getty Images)

Bhattacharya called for shifting the NIH’s focus to funding more innovative research and curbing the influence of some of its most senior officials.

Kennedy Jr. played a central role in selecting top health officials and surrogates for Trump’s next administration, including Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary, whom Trump named to head the Food and Drug Administration, and the internal medicine physician and former Republican congressman from Florida Dave Weldon, whom Trump appointed to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the report.

FILE: Jay Bhattacharya speaks during the 2023 Forbes Healthcare Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 5, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

Bhattacharya and Makary worked together on a draft of a proposed commission to study the country’s response to the coronavirus, the report said.

Trump’s selection of Makary, Weldon and family and emergency medicine physician Janette Nesheiwat, whom the president-elect nominated to be surgeon general, also must be confirmed by the Senate.

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The nominee for NIH director must be confirmed by the Senate, which will have a Republican majority starting in January. (Getty Images)

Bhattacharya was a prominent critic of the federal government’s response to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic. In October 2020, during Trump’s first term, he co-authored an open letter calling on the government to roll back pandemic-related shutdowns but maintain “targeted protections” for vulnerable populations such as the elderly.

The proposal was supported by Republican lawmakers and many Americans who were critical of the closures and wanted to return to pre-pandemic life. But public health experts, including then-NIH Director Francis S. Collins, criticized the proposal as premature and dangerous given the spread of COVID-19 at a time when vaccines were not yet available.

Bhattacharya also called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the NIH, arguing that some career officials misshaped national policy at the height of the pandemic and did not allow dissenting views.

The nominee for NIH director will not be official until President-elect Donald Trump announces it. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

He joined other agency critics in criticizing former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, who helped shape the country’s response to the coronavirus during the Trump and Biden administrations before leaving the federal government in December 2022.

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The NIH has also come under scrutiny from members of Congress over its response to the pandemic. Republicans accused the agency’s leadership of mismanaging the response to the virus and called for an overhaul of the agency.

Current and former NIH officials, including Fauci, have defended the agency’s response, arguing that federal leaders generally did their best to combat the virus.