Ramanan Laxminarayan
Drug Resistance Economist, Researcher and Founder of Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy
SPEAKER FEE RANGE: $10,000–$20,000 [FEE NOTE]
TRAVELS FROM: District of Columbia
RELATED TOPICS: Healthcare Expert, Other Health Issues
• Ramanan Laxminarayan Ph.D., M.P.H is founder and director of the One Health Trust
• He served on the President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s antimicrobial resistance working group.
• Laxminarayan was a key architect of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm).
• 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.
• Laxminarayan was among the earliest in warning about the potential devastation of COVID-19 in India.
• Laxminarayan and Dr Indu Bhushan, together lead OxygenForIndia, a volunteer driven campaign that eventually imported over 20,000 oxygen cylinders and 3,000 oxygen concentrators to alleviate the need for medical oxygen.
• In 2015, Laxminarayan founded HealthCubed, an award-winning start-up to improve access to healthcare and diagnosis for billions of people in both rich and poor countries.
• He served on the President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s antimicrobial resistance working group.
• Laxminarayan was a key architect of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm).
• 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.
• Laxminarayan was among the earliest in warning about the potential devastation of COVID-19 in India.
• Laxminarayan and Dr Indu Bhushan, together lead OxygenForIndia, a volunteer driven campaign that eventually imported over 20,000 oxygen cylinders and 3,000 oxygen concentrators to alleviate the need for medical oxygen.
• In 2015, Laxminarayan founded HealthCubed, an award-winning start-up to improve access to healthcare and diagnosis for billions of people in both rich and poor countries.
Ramanan Laxminarayan Ph.D., M.P.H., FIDSA 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 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 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 was among the earliest in warning about the potential devastation of COVID-19 in India. In a series of interviews in mid-March 2020, when India had fewer than 500 cases and 10 deaths, he predicted that over 200 million Indians would be infected and 1-2 million would die of the disease unless strict measures were put in place. His interview with the BBC,[20] Barkha Dutt [21] and Karan Thapar[22] which warned of a tsunami of Covid cases in India were viewed widely, and were believed to have prompted a widespread lockdown across India by the Indian government. In an oped published in the New York Times following the nationwide lockdown on March 24, 2020, Laxminarayan warned that India only had a few weeks to create an enormous, affordable and easily available testing infrastructure, contain local outbreaks and prepare for the avalanche of the coronavirus.[23] In an interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, he predicted that it was "likely that Covid will just rip through the population, unless something fundamentally changes in the virus its. f in India, for which we have no real evidence." He subsequently led the largest study of Covid epidemiology in the world, which was published in Science.
During the second Delta wave of COVID-19 in India during March and April 2021, Laxminarayan and a team of volunteers were instrumental in organizing imports of oxygen equipment to solve the challenge of last minute delivery of medical oxygen to patients. The campaign was supported by over 12,000 individual donors and large corporations including United Airlines, Logitech, UIPath, Yahoo and TechMahindra. Laxminarayan's colleague Rahul Thakkar, who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 and for whom Laxminarayan had started the campaign died of the disease in April 2021. OxygenForIndia, a volunteer driven campaign that eventually imported over 20,000 oxygen cylinders and 3,000 oxygen concentrators to alleviate the need for medical oxygen. Laxminarayan and Dr. Indu Bhushan, the founding CEO of Ayushman Bharat together lead OxygenForIndia's work on the formation of a national oxygen grid with the objective that no Indian will die because of lack of medical oxygen anytime, anywhere.
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 was among the earliest in warning about the potential devastation of COVID-19 in India. In a series of interviews in mid-March 2020, when India had fewer than 500 cases and 10 deaths, he predicted that over 200 million Indians would be infected and 1-2 million would die of the disease unless strict measures were put in place. His interview with the BBC,[20] Barkha Dutt [21] and Karan Thapar[22] which warned of a tsunami of Covid cases in India were viewed widely, and were believed to have prompted a widespread lockdown across India by the Indian government. In an oped published in the New York Times following the nationwide lockdown on March 24, 2020, Laxminarayan warned that India only had a few weeks to create an enormous, affordable and easily available testing infrastructure, contain local outbreaks and prepare for the avalanche of the coronavirus.[23] In an interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, he predicted that it was "likely that Covid will just rip through the population, unless something fundamentally changes in the virus its. f in India, for which we have no real evidence." He subsequently led the largest study of Covid epidemiology in the world, which was published in Science.
During the second Delta wave of COVID-19 in India during March and April 2021, Laxminarayan and a team of volunteers were instrumental in organizing imports of oxygen equipment to solve the challenge of last minute delivery of medical oxygen to patients. The campaign was supported by over 12,000 individual donors and large corporations including United Airlines, Logitech, UIPath, Yahoo and TechMahindra. Laxminarayan's colleague Rahul Thakkar, who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 and for whom Laxminarayan had started the campaign died of the disease in April 2021. OxygenForIndia, a volunteer driven campaign that eventually imported over 20,000 oxygen cylinders and 3,000 oxygen concentrators to alleviate the need for medical oxygen. Laxminarayan and Dr. Indu Bhushan, the founding CEO of Ayushman Bharat together lead OxygenForIndia's work on the formation of a national oxygen grid with the objective that no Indian will die because of lack of medical oxygen anytime, anywhere.
- The Coming Crisis in Antibiotics
Antibiotic drugs save lives. But we simply use them too much — and often for non-lifesaving purposes, like treating the flu and even raising cheaper chickens. The result, says researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, is that the drugs will stop working for everyone, as the bacteria they target grow more and more resistant. He calls on all of us (patients and doctors alike) to think of antibiotics — and their ongoing effectiveness — as a finite resource, and to think twice before we tap into it. It's a sobering look at how global medical trends can strike home.
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