Rajesh Panjabi

Born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia, physician Dr. Raj Panjabi is Co-Founder of Tiyatien Health and a Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Escaping from a line of refugees on an airfield during Liberia’s civil war, Dr. Panjabi was resettled with his family in America in 1990. Returning to Liberia in 2005, he and other Liberian civil war survivors, along with American colleagues, launched Tiyatien Health (“Justice In Health”), a non-profit organization working to pioneer community-based health services for rural communities living in Liberia’s rainforests. A partner project of Partners In Health, Tiyatien Health’s efforts to rebuild rural health services in war-torn Liberia have been featured by PBS, NPR, Scientific American, Forbes, and National Geographic.

With colleagues at the Liberian Ministry of Health and Tiyatien Health, Dr. Panjabi established the HIV Equity Initiative, a community-based program that revolutionized access to HIV treatment at public health centers across rural Liberia. He has conducted health systems research with Partners in Health, Physicians for Human Rights and served as a policy advisor for the Liberian Ministry of Health. Dr. Panjabi has served on the boards of Doctors For America and Sociologists Without Borders.

Dr. Panjabi has written on health, poverty and human rights for the Lancet, JAMA, and the Washington Post. He received a medical degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a Sommer Scholar in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Dr. Panjabi has been named a “hero of global health” by Scientific American Lives and received the Outstanding Recent Graduate Award from Johns Hopkins University. He is a Social Innovation Fellow at PopTech and Rainer Arnhold Fellow of the Mulago Foundation.