Raj Pannu, PhD

Dr. Raj Pannu is an expert on adapting marketing and advertising approaches to purpose-driven behavior change problems. He is the founder and CEO of Emergence, a creative communications agency dedicated to social purpose, and former Director of Global Health at McCann Health. He has advised and partnered with numerous institutions including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, CHAI, PEPFAR, The Coca-Cola Company and Sesame Workshop on strategic communications issues and major initiatives around global health and sustainability. He has been a member of the Essential Medicines Working Group of the United Nations and has been an invited speaker at the United Nations Foundation, the Kennedy School of Public Policy at Harvard University, The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, The Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, The Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and the Qatar Foundation. He recently served on a USAID evidence review panel on behavior change communications. Prior to his work in public health, Raj started the medical strategy group at McCann Regan Campbell Ward where he rose to the title of Chief Scientific Officer.
He earned his MS in Immunology in 1996 and his PhD in Biochemistry in 2002 from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. In 1999, Raj co-authored a paper in Science magazine describing a mechanism essential for poxvirus entry into human immune cells. He received an award for Services to Humanity for AIDS research from the Council of Indian Societies of Canada in 1999. He lives and works in New York.