Director of Global Public Health, McCann Health,

Dr. Raj Pannu is the Director of Global Public Health at McCann Health, part of McCann Worldgroup, one of the world’s largest global marketing and communications companies, with over 200 offices in 132 countries. Raj advises numerous global public health entities on private sector approaches to demand creation, and strategic design of behavior change communication. He has advised the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on scaling chlorhexidine antisepsis for the Behavior Change and the Spread of Family Health Innovations Panel, he currently represents McCann Health on the Essential Medicines Working Group, part of the UN Millennium Project, and recently addressed members of the UN Every Woman Every Child initiative on the importance of demand creation, at a public-private partnership meeting hosted by the UN Foundation during the 2012 UNGA in New York City. Prior to his current position, Raj was Chief Science Officer at McCann Health, where, for eight years he oversaw medical and scientific issues related to major health care brands and led numerous initiatives in strategic planning.

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. The report represented a watershed discovery - explaining for the first time the widespread dissemination of chemokine receptor mutations and resulting HIV resistance in the people of northern Europe. For his work, Raj received an award for Services to Humanity for AIDS research from the Council of Indian Societies of Canada in 1999.