Rick Bright

Rick Bright is currently the Senior Vice President, Pandemic Prevention and Response at The Rockefeller Foundation leading the development of the Foundation’s pandemic data and action platform that will prevent future pandemics by identifying and triggering responses to the earliest alerts of a disease outbreak and stopping it in the first 100 days. Prior to this role, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to BARDA, Dr. Bright gained extensive experience in the biotechnology industry where he served in senior leadership and executive management roles. Dr. Bright has held senior scientific leadership positions in non-governmental organizations where he championed innovative vaccine development and manufacturing capacity expansion in developing countries. He also spent a decade in vaccine and therapeutics development at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For this work, Dr. Bright received the Charles C. Shepard Science Award for Scientific Excellence. Dr. Bright serves as an international subject matter expert in biodefense, emergency preparedness and response, vaccine, drug and diagnostics development and served as an advisor to the Biden Administration, World Health Organization, development of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine Forum on Microbial Threats. Dr. Bright received a Ph.D. in Immunology and Molecular Pathogenesis from Emory University and a B.S. magna cum laude in Biology and Physical Sciences from Auburn University at Montgomery.