Former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers will serve as a member of one of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s three new advisory panels, which will each help guide an arm of the $34.6 billion philanthropic organization, the foundation announced yesterday.

While the Gates Foundation is the largest charitable institution in the world, it is known for its unusually small executive team. The foundation has just three trustees—Bill and Melinda Gates, and Warren E. Buffett, who last year promised more than $30 billion of his fortune to the foundation.

Summers, currently the Eliot University professor, will serve on the advisory panel to the foundation’s Global Development Program.

The foundation also announced that Glimp Professor of Economics Edward L. Glaeser will serve on the advisory panel to the foundation’s U.S. Program.
Gates, who dropped out of the College in 1975, was last year’s Commencement speaker. He and Summers sat next to each other on the steps of Memorial Church during the ceremony as they waited to receive honorary degrees from the University.

In a phone interview yesterday, Summers called Gates a “visionary in his philanthropy.”

“There’s no greater challenge than development in poor parts of the world, and there’s no private entity and few public entities that have the kind of resources to deploy that the Gates Foundation does,” Summers said. “I am honored to have been asked to help out.”

Summers will serve on the panel alongside Rajat Gupta, chairman of the board of the India School of Business; Amina J. Ibrahim, senior special assistant to the president of Nigeria; Kavita N. Ramdas, president of the Global Fund for Women; Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico; and Philip Zelikow, a professor of history at the University of Virginia.

The members of the foundation’s third panel, on global health, will be announced in the coming month.