Rajesh Ramesh Panjabi, M.D.

Raj Panjabi, MD, MPH is a distinguished authority in health care, biotechnology, entrepreneurship, and public health policy.

Senior Partner at Flagship Pioneering, Raj helps lead Flagship’s cross-company initiative to leverage AI and biotechnology to stop disease before it starts. He is also an associate physician and on faculty at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School, and author of Safer: A Playbook — Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community.

Panjabi volunteers with the HMS Asylum Clinic and is course director for Strengthening Community Health Worker Programs (HarvardX). He has cared for outpatients on Medicaid/Medicare in federally qualified health centers pioneering value-based care and inpatients in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. 

Previously, as Senior Director and Special Assistant to the President of the United States at the National Security Council, he served as the top health security official in the Biden-Harris White House. Panjabi 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 Strategy and American Pandemic Preparedness Plan, coordinating over $12 billion in annual investment across 16 federal agencies in biodefense, including disease surveillance, diagnostics, medicines, vaccines and health systems.

Panjabi helped oversee implementation of the President’s 2022 Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation.

Panjabi oversaw implementation of the 2022 U.S. Global Health Security Act, authorizing $5 billion, expanding health investments across 50 countries. He co-developed the President’s COVID-19 and health security initiatives with the G7 and G20, including organizing Presidential Summits, launching the World Bank Pandemic Fund, negotiating the WHO Pandemic Agreement and International Health Regulations, and upholding the UN Biological Weapons Convention.

Panjabi has held top 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 an ~$800 million enterprise protecting 700 million people across 30 countries.

He was founding CEO of Last Mile Health, which leverages digital technology to train thousands of community healthcare providers serving millions of people.

Forbes has named him one of America’s 250 greatest living immigrants celebrating the American Dream, and he has also been named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and one of Fortune’s 50 World’s Greatest Leaders. He's also the recipient of the 2017 TED Prize, 2015 Clinton Global Citizen Award and the Dean's Medal from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

Dr. Panjabi is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, received a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and trained in Internal Medicine and Primary Care as a Resident and Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.