Dr. Raj Pannu, PhD

An expert on adapting private sector approaches to behavior change to public interest problems, Raj is the Founder and CEO of Emergence Creative and former Director of Global Health at McCann Health. He has advised and partnered with governments, multilateral agencies, corporations, non-governmental organizations, and media companies including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, CHAI, PEPFAR, The Coca-Cola Company and numerous other organizations on strategic communications issues and major initiatives around global health and sustainability. He was a member of the Essential Medicines Working Group of the United Nations and has been an invited speaker at the United Nations Foundation, the Kennedy School of Public Policy at Harvard University, The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, The Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, The Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and the Qatar Foundation. He recently served on a USAID evidence review panel on behavior change communications.

He earned his MS in Immunology in 1996 and his PhD in Biochemistry in 2002 from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. For a major article that appeared in Science magazine in 1999, Raj worked with a research team to describe a mechanism essential for poxvirus entry into human immune cells. For his work, Raj received an award for Services to Humanity for AIDS research from the Council of Indian Societies of Canada in 1999. He lives and works in New York City.