Raj Panjabi

Rajesh "Raj" Panjabi (born February 3, 1981) is a Liberian Indian American physician. He is the co-founder/CEO of Last Mile Health and on the faculty of the Division of Global Health Equity at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital .

At age 9, Panjabi escaped a civil war in his home country of Liberia . He returned to Liberia in 2005 as a 24-year-old medical student to serve the people he had left behind, co-founding Last Mile Health . Last Mile Health saves lives in the world's most remote communities by partnering with governments to design, scale and advocate for national networks of community health professionals . The work of Panjabi and Last Mile Health has been published in the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and PLoS Medicine and has been featured by TIME , Fortune , Forbes , the Wall Street Journal , NPR , and the New York Times .

In 2016, Panjabi won the $1 million TED Prize for 2017. Following the TED Prize announcement, Bill Gates wrote on Twitter that Panjabi's "commitment to help the world’s poorest is inspiring. This is a well-deserved honor."

In 2016, TIME Magazine named Panjabi to its annual list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”, with a tribute from President Bill Clinton, recognizing Last Mile Health's work "to put a health care worker within reach of everyone everywhere."

In 2015, Fortune Magazine named Dr. Panjabi one of the "World’s 50 Greatest Leaders," recognizing Last Mile Health's work to support the Liberian Government to build a national community health workforce.

Panjabi is a Forbes 400 Philanthropy Fellow , a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Social Entrepreneur , and an Echoing Green Fellow . Panjabi is a recipient of the Clinton Global Citizen Award , Outstanding Recent Graduate Award from Johns Hopkins University , the Distinguished Young Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Harvard Burke Global Health Fellowship , and the Global Citizen Movement Award

Panjabi delivered the commencement address at the graduation of Harvard Medical School in 2015 on the "Power of Selflessness." Panjabi delivered testimony at the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy session, "A Progress Report on the West Africa Ebola Epidemic" - arguing investments in rural community health workers can help make health systems responsive to Ebola and future epidemics. Panjabi highlighted the role of investing in rural community health workers at the TIME-Fortune Global Forum hosted by His Holiness Pope Francis in 2016.

Panjabi was a co-author of the global report, "Strengthening Primary Health Care through Community Health Workers: Investment Case and Financing Recommendations." The report found that investment in community health worker (CHW) programs can deliver a high economic return—up to 10:1—and calls on government leaders, international financiers, donors, and the global health community broadly to take specific actions to support the financing and scale up of CHW programs across sub-Saharan Africa.

Panjabi is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, received a Masters of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School and trained in internal medicine and primary care at the Massachusetts General Hospital.