Raj Panjabi

Biography

The Honorable Dr. Raj Panjabi is former White House Senior Director and globally recognized as a distinguished authority in healthcare, public policy, entrepreneurship, and technology. Dr. Panjabi is Senior Partner at Flagship Pioneering, leading the Preemptive Health and Medicine Initiative, which is pioneering a new field to protect, maintain or improve people's health before they get sick. He is also on faculty at Harvard Medical School.

As White House Senior Director and Special Assistant to President Biden, Panjabi served as the top pandemic and health official at the National Security Council. He played a pivotal role in the largest vaccination campaign in history against COVID-19 and responses to public health crises, including Mpox, Influenza and Ebola. He played a lead role executing the 2022 National Biodefense and American Pandemic Preparedness Plans, coordinating over $12 billion in annual investment across 16 federal agencies in biodefense, including in disease surveillance, diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines and health systems. Panjabi helped oversee implementation of the President’s 2022 Bioeconomy Executive Order, directing federal agencies to drive research and development, streamline regulation, grow manufacturing, and expand markets for biotechnology products, including by leveraging artificial intelligence.

Dr. Panjabi oversaw implementation of the 2022 U.S. Global Health Security Act, authorizing $5 billion and expanding health investments across 50 countries. He co-developed the President’s COVID-19 and health security initiatives with the G7, G20, and regional bodies, including efforts to organize Presidential Summits, launch the Pandemic Fund at the World Bank, negotiate the WHO Pandemic Accord and uphold the UN Biological Weapons Convention.

Panjabi held top healthcare executive roles. Leading the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, he helped launch the world’s first malaria vaccine, create a strategy to prevent 1 billion cases and manage a $800 million enterprise protecting 700 million people across 30 countries. For 14 years he was Co-Founder and CEO of Last Mile Health, a social enterprise leveraging digital technology to train thousands of healthcare providers serving millions of people.