Hanover -- A Harvard-trained physician and anthropologist who founded an international relief organization that brought medicine to some of the world's most impoverished nations was named the 17th president of Dartmouth College yesterday, succeeding James Wright, who will retire after 11 years.

Korean-born Jim Yong Kim, 49, whose global health work was featured in author Tracy Kidder's 2003 book Mountains Beyond Mountains, is the first Asian American to be named president of an Ivy League college.

“He's an extraordinary man who has taken an unusual path to us today, but one who shares deeply the values Dartmouth holds dear,” college Board of Trustees Chairman Ed Haldeman said yesterday in introducing Kim.

In a telephone interview shortly before his introduction at the college yesterday, Kim said he recently looked at options for the next phase of his life with his physician wife and two young sons and thought: “Do I continue to throw one body at a problem” or reach thousands of Dartmouth students and “prepare them as well-rounded individuals to take on everything in the world?”

“There was no question that I would enthusiastically accept this job to continue to make the world a better place,” he said. “It's an opportunity of a lifetime, literally.”

In his speech yesterday before a packed house in the 900-seat Spaulding Auditorium, Kim quoted Dartmouth's 12th president, John Sloan Dickey, who in 1946 told Dartmouth students, “The world's troubles are your troubles.”

“In my small way, I've helped to make the world's troubles my troubles,” said Kim.

Dartmouth's selection of Kim followed discussions in the college community of the next president having more of an “international presence, a global impact,” said Albert Mulley Jr., a Massachusetts General Hospital physician and 1970 Dartmouth graduate who chaired the Presidential Search Committee.

“Jim aims to redouble Dartmouth's efforts to provide leadership on the global stage,” Mulley said. “Throughout his life, Jim has been devoted to teaching and inspiring young people both inside and outside the classroom.”

Mulley said the committee considered 400 candidates, 307 of whom were looked at “explicitly,” he said. Committee members interviewed more than 100, then whittled the group to about a dozen.

When Dartmouth professor Lisa Adams, a physician who teaches courses in global health, found out Kim was Dartmouth's choice yesterday, she said she was stunned, in a wonderful way.

“I teach the work that he's done and it's like having the visionary, the hero, right here,” she said. “I've just been circling the clouds since I found out.”

His friends and those who know him professionally call Kim a brilliant, charismatic leader with a warm, gentle demeanor.

“He's very smart, he's really smart, I'm serious,” Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, said from his Williamsburg, Mass., home yesterday. “I'm sure Dartmouth will never be quite the same.”

Those who know Kim's work with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis patients for the World Health Organization and with Dr. Paul Farmer in Partners In Health, the nonprofit organization the pair founded in 1987, say Kim has never limited himself to thinking conventionally.

“He's always been one to push the envelope,” said Nils Daulaire of Royalton, who stepped down last month as president of the White River Junction-based Global Health Council. “Jim is someone who doesn't just think outside the box, he thinks without a box there at all.”

Daulaire, speaking by phone yesterday from Seattle, said Kim refused to accept being told that it was impossible to treat patients suffering from HIV/AIDS and drug-residents tuberculosis in impoverished places such as Haiti, Peru, Rwanda and Lesotho.

“What Jim has based his work and his career on is to start with the premise that people have a social right to the benefits of what science and society have created, that those are not special privileges for a limited portion of humankind,” Daulaire said.

Both Kim and Daulaire have in recent weeks been mentioned in the national press as potential candidates to be global AIDS coordinator under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Daulaire last month said a position with the Obama administration “might materialize.” And yesterday Kim, when asked whether he had been a candidate for the AIDS job, said, “There were some options that I have been trying to think about,” as he considered the Dartmouth position.

On being the first Asian American to head one of the eight Ivy League schools, Kim said the distinction is not limited to the Ivy League, as there are very few Asian Americans leading colleges and universities nationwide, he said.

And, he added, the landmark appointment “certainly matters to my mother. She's very, very proud of that. I suspect it will matter to other Asians and Asian Americans as well.”

In his speech, Kim credited his mother, who studied theology and has a doctorate in philosophy, and his “practical” dentist-father, who died two decades ago, with teaching him important lessons.

From his father, he learned “the value of hard work, determination, and keeping both feet firmly on the ground.” His mother taught Kim “to respect every individual,” he said.

Kim was born in 1959 in Seoul, Korea. His family immigrated to Dallas, then a year later moved to Muscatine, Iowa, when Kim was a second-grader.

He is chairman of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and director of the Harvard School of Public Health's Francoise-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.

Steven Kadish, who works with Kim at both Harvard and Brigham and Women's, yesterday accompanied Kim from Boston to Hanover. He said he wanted to witness the Dartmouth announcement.

“You'll find his heart and how human he is matches his intellect,” Kadish added.

Later, as Kim greeted hundreds of well-wishers at a reception in the Hopkins Center, Kadish stood nearby holding a handful of copies of a special edition of The Dartmouth, the college's student newspaper, which he wanted Kim to take home to show his wife, Younsook Lim.

While Kim has no prior connection to Dartmouth, Lim studied at the college's Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice when she was a medical fellow, according to The Dartmouth.

In introducing Kim yesterday, Haldeman said the next president is “an inspirational educator, internationally-recognized physician, an anthropologist, innovative global health leader and former quarterback of Muscatine High School football team.”

Both Kim and Wright, 69, received thunderous standing ovations, with cheers for Wright -- thanked for his service by Haldeman -- accompanied by loud hoots and whistles from the crowd.

Kim will take office July 1, after Wright's retirement following 40 years at Dartmouth.

After Kim spoke, he walked to Wright and offered his hand as the retiring president enveloped his successor in a hug. Kim later said he found the ceremony “very moving and humbling.”

His new job is not the only life-changing experience Kim has had in the last few days. His second son, still unnamed, was born on Friday.

“It's been quite a week,” he told the crowd. “My older son, Tom, said to me just yesterday, ‘Dad, why does everything have to happen to us at the same time?' ”