Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan

Laxminarayan is founder and president of the One Health Trust in Washington, D.C. and Bangalore, a senior research scholar at Princeton University, and director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Antimicrobial Resistance in New Delhi. He is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an honorary associate at the National University of Singapore Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. He is founder at HealthCubed, which works to improve access to healthcare and diagnostics worldwide.

Since 1995, 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 2016 and 2024.

During the Obama Administration, Laxminarayan served on the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s antimicrobial resistance working group and in 2015 was appointed a voting member of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance where he served until 2023. From 2018 to 2024, Laxminarayan was the first board chair 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 a series editor of the Disease Control Priorities for Developing Countries, 3rd edition.

Laxminarayan is a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science and 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), the BP Koirala medal in honor of Nepal’s first democratically elected Prime Minister and 2024 Garrod Medal by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

Laxminarayan’s work has been featured on ABC’s 60 minutes and on PBS Frontline as well as various documentary films, and has been widely covered in major media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, 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 400 books, book chapters, and peer reviewed papers in leading journals in science, medicine and economics.