Prof. Dr. Ashish K. Jha

Dr. Ashish K. Jha is a physician, scientist, and one of the world's leading authorities on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. He is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of BioRadar, a biointelligence company building biological threat detection infrastructure, and a Senior Fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. From 2022 to 2023, Dr. Jha served as White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, where he led the U.S. government's pandemic response and the national vaccination and therapeutics effort. He advised the President on emerging variants and biological risk, and worked with governments, multilateral institutions, and industry across the globe. He served in a nonpartisan capacity, as he has throughout his career. At BioRadar, Dr. Jha is building what he argues the world still lacks: a weather service for biological threats. Today's systems function like a fire department — capable of responding once an outbreak is burning, but blind to what is coming. BioRadar integrates metagenomic sequencing of environmental samples, clinical signals, and AI-driven analytics to detect dangerous pathogens early, when outbreaks can still be contained rather than merely managed. Dr. Jha previously served as Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and as Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. He has published more than 300 papers on health systems, biosecurity, and pandemic response, has been cited over 56,000 times, and ranks among the world's top one percent of most-cited scientists. He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was named to Fortune's list of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders. He writes the newsletter A Moment in Health and is a frequent contributor to the Boston Globe, STAT News, and the BMJ.