Ramanan Laxminarayan

Drug-resistance economist
At the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, economist Ramanan Laxminarayan looks at big-picture issues of global health.

Why you should listen

Economist Ramanan Laxminarayan works to improve understanding of drug resistance as a problem of managing a shared global resource. As Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP), he is interested in cross-disciplinary, pragmatic solutions to reduce drug resistance. He has advised the World Health Organization and World Bank on evaluating malaria treatment policy, vaccination strategies, the economic burden of tuberculosis, and control of non-communicable diseases. He was a key architect of the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria, a novel financing mechanism to improve access and delay resistance to antimalarial drugs. In 2012, he created the Immunization Technical Support Unit in India, which has been credited with improving the immunization program in the country. He teaches at Princeton.

As he says: "It has been a long time since people died of untreatable bacterial infections, and the prospect of returning to that world is worrying."

Ramanan Laxminarayan’s TED talk