Atlanta's 500 Most Powerful Leaders in 2026: Education and Health Care
Morehouse School of Medicine President and CEO Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, alumna Dr. Gulshan Harjee, and former presidents Dr. David Satcher and Dr. Louis Sullivan are honored for their leadership.
By Atlanta Magazine
These are Atlanta's 500 most powerful leaders. We spent months consulting experts and sorting through nominations to get a list of the city's most influential people — from artists to chefs to philanthropists to sports coaches and corporate CEOs. In this section, we focus on kindergarten through high school, higher education and health care.
Higher Education
Valerie Montgomery Rice, MD, FACOG
President and CEO
Morehouse School of Medicine
Valerie Montgomery Rice is the sixth president of Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) and the first woman to lead the freestanding medical institution. Before joining MSM in 2011 as executive vice president, Dr. Montgomery Rice was the founding director of the Center for Women’s Health Research at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, one of the nation’s first research centers devoted to studying diseases that disproportionately affect women of color. A renowned reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist, Dr. Montgomery Rice was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2016, and in 2022, she was appointed by President Joe Biden to serve on the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science.
EDUCATION: Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School (MD)
NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS: Dr. Montgomery Rice has doubled MSM’s medical student class size from 55 to 110 annually, expanded degree programs from eight to 16 and grew graduate medical education (GME) programs from seven to 14. She also established MSM’s Master of Science in Medical Sciences program, which has produced 233 graduates and become a national model. Her awards include the Atlanta Business Chronicle Health Care Champion Lifetime Achievement Award (2025).
Healthcare
Gulshan Harjee, MD
Cofounder
Mosaic Health Center
Following three decades in private practice, Dr. Gulshan Harjee cofounded Mosaic Health Center, formerly Clarkston Community Health Center, in 2015. Mosaic Health Center is a nonprofit free health clinic serving the immigrant, refugee and uninsured populations of metro Atlanta. The clinic has since had more than 10,000 patient visits, provided free mammograms, insulin, and dental care to asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants, and offered educational experiences to hundreds of local medical and nursing students. Dr. Harjee and Mosaic’s executive director Jeremy Cole were Health Equity Leaders of the Year honorees for Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 2025 Health Care Champion Awards.
EDUCATION: Morehouse School of Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine (MD)
REASON FOR CHOOSING THIS WORK: I grew up in a village in Tanzania, a healthcare desert where access to vaccines could be a challenge and survived deadly cases of malaria and typhoid. It was a realization how fortunate I had been.
WHAT I’D TELL MY 18-YEAR-OLD SELF: My 18-year-old self would be very naive. She would want to know not to be afraid to speak your mind and to hold your cool no matter how urgent a task may be.
GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: My greatest accomplishment is to have raised my kids to be good human beings and to be community- and charitable-minded.
Legends
David Satcher, MD, PhD
A renowned physician, public health leader and scholar, Dr. David Satcher is best known for serving as the 16th U.S. Surgeon General. Prior to that, he was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a former president of Morehouse School of Medicine and founding director of the MSM Satcher Health Leadership Institute.
Louis W. Sullivan, MD
With the exception of his four-year tenure as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which ended in 1993, Sullivan was founding dean and president of Morehouse School of Medicine for more than 20 years. He also founded the Sullivan Alliance (now part of the Association of American Medical Colleges), which aims to increase the numbers of ethnic and racial minorities in health care, and is chairman of the Georgia Global Health Alliance.