Ben Carson
Neurosurgeon and former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr. (born September 18, 1951) is an American retired neurosurgeon, academic, author, and government official serving as the National Nutrition Advisor at the Department of Agriculture since 2025. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 to 2021.
Carson became the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the United States in 1984, when he took the job at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center at age 33. In 1987, he gained fame for leading a team of surgeons in the first-known separation of conjoined twins joined at the back of the head. He performed the first successful neurosurgical procedure on a fetus inside the womb, developed new methods to treat brain-stem tumors, and revitalized hemispherectomy techniques for controlling seizures. He has written more than 100 neurosurgical publications. He retired from medicine in 2013; at the time, he was professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Carson gained national fame among political conservatives after delivering a speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast that was perceived as critical of the policies of President Barack Obama. After widespread speculation about a presidential run, Carson announced his campaign for the 2016 Republican nomination for president in May 2015.
“Ben Carson” enters the record as neurosurgeon and former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Carson, Neurosurgeon and former can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q816459. VIAF identifies the subject as 71503552. The Library of Congress control number is n90607854. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 2025, 2017 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ben Carson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.