Ramanan Laxminarayan

Affiliations

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Ramanan Laxminarayan Ph.D., M.P.H., FIDSA (born 1970 in Kampala, Uganda) is an economist and an epidemiologist. He is founder and director of the One Health Trust - formerly known as the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) - in Washington, D.C., and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Antimicrobial Resistance. Laxminarayan is a senior research scholar at Princeton University, an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde. His research on epidemiological models of infectious diseases and economic analysis of drug resistance, and research on public health gets attention from leaders and policymakers worldwide. He served on the President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s antimicrobial resistance working group. He is also a voting member of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance. He has served as chairperson of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing new antimicrobials, since its founding. GARDP was created by the World Health Organization and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi). Laxminarayan was a key architect of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm), an innovative financing mechanism to provide affordable, effective antimalarial drugs worldwide. The idea emerged from an Institute of Medicine panel chaired by economist Kenneth Arrow that called for global subsidies to ensure that artemisinin-based antimalarials were introduced to crowd out monotherapies that would result in resistance. Laxminarayan served on that panel and subsequently worked extensively on the design of the subsidy mechanism. AMFm was launched in 2008 with a commitment from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Laxminarayan is a leading global expert on understanding of antibiotic resistance as a problem of managing a shared global resource. Through his prolific research, active public outreach and sustained policy engagement, Laxminarayan 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. His TED talk on antibiotic resistance which helped bring attention to this issue has been viewed more than a million times. During the Obama Administration, Laxminarayan served on the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology's antimicrobial resistance working group. He was subsequently appointed a voting member of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance in 2016. He was appointed to a second term under the Trump Administration. Laxminarayan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, and a fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America. He is a series editor of the Disease Control Priorities for Developing Countries, 3rd edition. (Source: DBPedia)