Raj Panjabi

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

The son of Indian immigrants who had migrated to West Africa, Panjabi was born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia. After civil war broke out in Liberia in 1989, Panjabi, at age nine, and his family fled on a cargo plane to Sierra Leone and eventually resettled, initially with a host family, in the United States in High Point, North Carolina. Panjabi returned to Liberia years later, in 2005, as a medical student. With a small team of Liberian civil war survivors, American health workers and $6,000 he'd received as a wedding gift, Panjabi co-founded Last Mile Health.

Last Mile Health partners with governments to save lives in the world’s most remote communities by creating national networks of community health workers -- workers who are hired from their own villages, mentored by nurses, and given the medical training and medicines they need to bring health care to their neighbors’ doorsteps. The work of Panjabi and Last Mile Health has been published in the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, PLoS Medicine, the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 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.

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.