Dean of the School of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside
President of James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF)
Founder and President of the One Health Trust, Senior Research Scholar, Princeton University
Director of Infection Control Programme & WHO Collaborating Centre on Patient Safety, The University of Geneva Hospitals and Faculty of Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland
Director of MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit Head, Health & Population Division, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Clinical Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco
Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Founding CEO of Ayushman Bharat- Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yohana (AB- PMJAY)
Ravi Mehrotra
Nachiket Mor
Arun Seth
B.R. Das
Dean of the School of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside
Dr. Anil Deolalikar is a Professor of Economics and Founding Dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. He also serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors of the University of California Global Health Institute. He taught previously at the University of Washington, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University, and served as Lead Human Development Economist for the World Bank in India during 2002-03.
Dr. Deolalikar is a development economist who has published numerous books and journal articles on the economics of child nutrition, health, education, poverty, and social protection in developing countries.
He is co-editor of The Journal of Asian and African Studies and The Journal of Developing Societies, and also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the World Scientific Series in Grand Public Policy Challenges of the 21st Century. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the Robert McNamara Fellowship for International Development awarded by the World Bank.
Dr. Deolalikar has served as a consultant to a number of developing-country governments and international organizations, including the ADB, World Bank, UNDP, and USAID, on a variety of research and policy projects.
He obtained his BA summa cum laude in economics from Harvard University, Diploma in Economics from Cambridge University, Ph.D. from Stanford University, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Economic Demography from Yale University.
President of James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF)
Dr. Susan M. Fitzpatrick (Ph.D.) is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Occupational Therapy at Washington University School of Medicine and is a volunteer faculty member at the Center for Biology and Society, School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Women in Science. Dr. Fitzpatrick lectures and writes on issues concerning applications of neuroscience to clinical problems, the translation of cognitive science to educational settings, the role of private philanthropy in the support of scientific research, and issues related to the public dissemination of and understanding of science.
She is President and CEO of the James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF) since 2015 but has worked with the foundation in different roles since 1993. She serves on the boards of the Ontario Brain Institute, the Missouri Science and Technology Fellows Program, and OpenBoxScience.org. Dr. Fitzpatrick is a member of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute and is on the Advisory Council for the Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology at Simon Fraser University.
With her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Neurology from Cornell University Medical College (1984), she pursued post-doctoral training with in vivo NMR spectroscopic studies of brain metabolism/function in the Department of Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics at Yale University.
Dr. Fitzpatrick served as the Associate Executive Director of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis (1989-1992), as Executive Director of the Brain Trauma Foundation (1992-1993), and is a past member of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Occupational Therapy Foundation, and Research!America. She is a former President and Chair of the Board of the Association for Women in Science and has served as a member of the International Advisory Council of the Rotman Institute for Philosophy.
Founder and President of the One Health Trust, Senior Research Scholar, Princeton University
Dr. Laxminarayan is founder and president of the One Health Trust, founded as the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP). He is a senior research scholar at Princeton University. He is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Dr. Laxminarayan chairs the board of GARD-P, a global product development partnership created by the World Health Organization, that aims to develop and deliver new treatments for bacterial infections. He is founder and board chair at HealthCubed, which works to improve access to healthcare and diagnostics worldwide.
Since 1995, Dr. Laxminarayan has worked to improve the understanding of antibiotic resistance as a problem of managing a shared global resource. His work encompasses extensive peer-reviewed research, public outreach, and direct engagement across Asia and Africa through the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership. Through his prolific research, active public outreach (including a TED talk that has been viewed over a million times), and sustained policy engagement, he has played a central role in bringing the issue of drug resistance to the attention of leaders and policymakers worldwide and to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2016.
During the Obama Administration, Dr. Laxminarayan served on the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s antimicrobial resistance working group and was appointed a voting member of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance. He is a series editor of the Disease Control Priorities for Developing Countries, 3rd edition.
In 2003-04, he served on the National Academy of Science/Institute of Medicine Committee on the Economics of Antimalarial Drugs and subsequently helped create the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria, a $450 million novel financing mechanism for antimalarials that reduced the cost of antimalarials worldwide. In 2012, Dr. Laxminarayan created the Immunization Technical Support Unit that supports the immunization program of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of India, which is credited with helping introduce four new vaccines and extending vaccination coverage to 3 million infants. As Vice President, Research and Policy at the Public Health Foundation of India between 2011 and 2015, he led the growth of a research division to over 700 technical and research staff.
Dr. Laxminarayan currently leads the largest Covid-19 epidemiology study in the world based on extensive contact tracing in India. The flagship paper from this study was published in Science in 2020.
Dr. Laxminarayan is a fellow of the American Academy for Advancement of Science and of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was named a distinguished alumnus by the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani in 2019, and by the University of Washington Department of Economics in 2020. He is a winner of the Ella Pringle medal by the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh (Pringle was the first-ever woman elected to the RCPE) and the BP Koirala medal in honor of Nepal’s first democratically elected Prime Minister. Dr. Laxminarayan’s work has been widely covered in major media outlets including the the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, BBC, Financial Times, CNN, the Economist, LA Times, NBC, NPR, Reuters, Science, Wall Street Journal, and the National Journal. His research includes over 300 books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed papers in leading journals in science, medicine, and economics.
Director of Infection Control Programme & WHO Collaborating Centre on Patient Safety, The University of Geneva Hospitals and Faculty of Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland
Professor Didier Pittet is the Hospital Epidemiologist and Director of the Infection Control Programme & World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Patient Safety, University of Geneva Hospitals and Faculty of Medicine, Switzerland. He holds Honorary Professorships at Imperial College (London), Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Health Science (Hong Kong), and the First Medical School of the Fu (Shanghai). Professor Pittet is also a fellow of the Royal Medical Association (Ireland) and an Honorary Member of the All-Russian Scientific Societies of Epidemiologists, Microbiologists and Parasitologists, and the French Academy of Surgery.
Author and co-author of more than 500 publications in scientific journals and editor of the first textbook “Hand Hygiene – A Handbook for Medical Professionals” (Pittet, Boyce, Allegranzi, edition Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), Professor Pittet is a member of the editorial boards of many prestigious scientific journals, including The Lancet Infectious Diseases. He is also an editorial consultant for The Lancet. The books “Clean Hands Save Lives” (Editions L’Âge d’Homme, 2014), available in 19 languages and “Adapt to Adopt” (Editions Nouvelle Imprimerie Laballery, 2021) written by French writer Thierry Crouzet, and the documentary film “Clean Hands” (Aftermedia 2016, 8 languages) describe Didier Pittet’s medical odyssey dedicated to the promotion of hand hygiene worldwide.
Professor Pittet is the recipient of several national and international honors including a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) awarded by Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II for services to the prevention of healthcare-associated infection in the UK (2007), the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America Lectureship (2008), the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases’ Award for Excellence (2009), the American Society for Microbiology (2016), the Robert Koch Award (2017), and the Pasteur Medal (2020).
Since 2005, Professor Pittet has been working closely with the WHO as the lead adviser of the First Global Patient Safety Challenge, whose Clean Care is Safer Care program is active in hospitals in 189 of the 195 UN member states. Professor Pittet conducts numerous research projects, in particular concerning the epidemiology, prevention, and control of infections and the development of innovative strategies to improve hand hygiene compliance and the quality of patient care to promote their safety. He is also involved in numerous humanitarian projects. Professor Pittet is also credited with revolutionizing patient care processes in hospitals by replacing hand washing with soap and water with the systematic use of alcohol-based handrubs (ABHR) and spreading this change in practice to healthcare centers around the world. His work has also involved the donation of a patent-free ABHR solution formulation to the WHO to facilitate its global distribution at lower cost, leading to its inclusion in the WHO list of Essential Medicines in 2012.
In June 2020, Professor Pittet was appointed by the President of the French Republic, Mr. Emmanuel Macron, as president of an independent mission created to assess the management of the COVID-19 crisis and to better address the risks posed by the pandemic. He delivered the report of this commission in May 2021. The mission’s primary objective was to assess the relevance, speed, and proportionality of the French response in the management of the health, social and economic crises, in particular in comparison to other countries’ responses.
Director of MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit Head, Health & Population Division, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Dr. Steve Tollman (MBBCh, MMed, MA, MPH, PhD) is founding director of the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt), and director of the Health and Population Division in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand. He is a member of the Harvard Centre for Population & Development
Steve studied medicine at Wits University, philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and public health at Harvard University.
Steve was the founding Board Chair of INDEPTH (International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and Their Health) and was a principal investigator for multi-center research into aging, migration, health, cardiovascular genomics, and cause-of-death. He serves on several fellowship and grant review panels. His ongoing commission participation includes Migration and Health (UCL-Lancet); Global challenge of multimorbidity (Academy of Sciences, UK), and Continuing epidemiological transition in sub-Saharan Africa (National Academies of Science, USA).
Steve received the 2018 National Science and Technology Forum South32 award for “An outstanding contribution to Science, Engineering and Technology and Innovation in management and related activities”.
Steve’s major research interests include adult health and aging, cardiometabolic disease, and chronic care.
Clinical Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco
Mary E. Wilson, M.D. is a Clinical Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, and an Adjunct Professor of Global Health and Population, at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She received her MD from the University of Wisconsin and is board certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases (residency and fellowship at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston). Her academic interests include antibiotic resistance, the ecology of infections and the emergence of microbial threats, travel medicine, tuberculosis, and vaccines.
She is a fellow in the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American College of Physicians, the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and the International Society of Travel Medicine. She has served on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Academic Advisory Committee for the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico, and on six committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she was Vice-Chair of the Forum on Microbial Threats.
Dr. Wilson was a member of the Pew National Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, whose report, “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America”, was released in the spring of 2008. She is the author of “A World Guide to Infections: Diseases, Distribution, Diagnosis” (Oxford University Press, 1991). She was the senior editor, with Richard Levins and Andrew Spielman, of “Disease in Evolution: Global Changes and Emergence of Infectious Diseases” (NY Academy of Sciences, 1994). Dr. Wilson was the editor of “New and Emerging Infectious Diseases” (Medical Clinics of North America) and the author of “Antibiotics: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is one of the medical editors for the CDC’s “Health Information for International Travel” (Yellow Book); she serves as an advisor to the GeoSentinel Surveillance Network’ and is a contributing editor for NEJM Journal Watch Infectious Diseases. She has served on several boards and advisory committees, including the Board of Trustees for ICCDRB in Bangladesh, the Advisory Board for the Fogarty International Center at NIH, the Board of Visitors for the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin, and the Advisory Committee for the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.
Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Dr. David Heymann is a medical epidemiologist and Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. From 2009 to 2017 he was chair of the UK Health Protection Agency and then Public Health England, and during this period he also led the Centre on Global Health Security at Chatham House (London). From 1989 to 2009 Heymann held various leadership positions in infectious diseases at WHO, and in 2003 headed the WHO global response to SARS in his role as executive director of communicable diseases. In 1976, after spending two years working in India on smallpox eradication, Heymann was a member of the CDC (Atlanta) team to investigate the first Ebola outbreak in DRC and stayed on in sub-Saharan Africa for 13 years in various field research positions on Ebola, monkeypox, Lassa Fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases. Heymann has published over 275 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, is editor of the Control of Communicable Diseases Manual, and is an elected member of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the US National Academy of Medicine. In 2009 he was named an Honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to global health.
Founding CEO of Ayushman Bharat- Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yohana (AB- PMJAY)
Dr. Indu Bhushan, Ph.D., has a career spanning almost 40 years across a multitude of sectors. He began his career in the Indian government (Rajasthan State), where he served for nine years as an Indian Administrative Service officer, a highly coveted role in India. Thereafter, he worked as a Senior Economist with the World Bank Group before moving to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 1997.
He served as Director General of the East Asia Department of ADB and held multiple positions within ADB, including Director General of the Strategy and Policy Department. He led ADB’s engagement with several Asian economies including the People’s Republic of China and he provided oversight to sectors, including the energy, environment, natural resources, agriculture, transport, public management, financial and regional cooperation, and urban and social development sectors.
In 2018, Dr. Bhushan was appointed the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Ayushman Bharat – Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB – PMJAY), a flagship health assurance scheme of the Indian government, covering more than 500 million citizens. As the founding CEO, he led the design, development, and rollout of the scheme, and oversaw its implementation in the country. He also initiated the implementation of the ambitious National Digital Health Mission (later renamed Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission).
Dr. Bhushan holds a Ph.D. in Health Economics and a Master of Health Sciences from Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Banaras Hindu University (IIT BHU) and IIT Delhi, where he completed his B. Tech and Post Graduate Diploma, respectively. He is also a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
Ravi Mehrotra
Professor Mehrotra is an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Rollins Institute of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, and the Founder of the Centre for Health Innovation and Policy (CHIP) Foundation. Dr. Mehrotra holds degrees in Medicine from the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, MD, and a PhD from the University of Allahabad. He sits on the Scientific Council of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization. He was the Founder-CEO of the ICMR-India Cancer Research Consortium and is the former director of the ICMR-National Institute of Cancer Prevention and Research (NICPR) and the WHO FCTC Global Knowledge Hub on Smokeless Tobacco.
Nachiket Mor
Nachiket Mor, PhD, is an Economist by training, with a focus on Health Systems Design. He is a Visiting Scientist at The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT Bangalore. Dr. Mor is a board member of Swash Digital Health Foundation and Navi as well.
Arun Seth
After a successful corporate career, Arun Seth took early retirement to give back to society. Mr. Seth has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta; is the former chairman of the NASSCOM foundation; and an active board member of Narayana Health, Jubilant Pharmova, Jubilant Ingrevia, Nutanix USA, Healthcubed, and other institutions. He is a Governing Board Member of HelpAge India and he is active on the boards for the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People, the Nudge Foundation, and Give India. In his work to foster entrepreneurship, he also participated in the founding of the TiE Delhi Chapter and is currently a Charter Member.
B.R. Das
Dr. B.R. Das is the Chief Evangelist of MEDAS GmbH, Germany and the Founder President of the Molecular Pathology Association of India. He is also the International Affairs Committee member of AMP, the Global Body of Molecular Pathology, and the former President, Executive Director, and Advisor & Mentor of SRL Diagnostics. With a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Banaras Hindu University, Dr. Das has served as a Visiting Professor and Research Guide in institutions like Case Western Reserve University Hospital, Cleveland and Kyoto Medical School. Dr. Das has also received several prestigious national and international awards, including the 100 Most Impactful Healthcare Leaders Award, listed globally.
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