Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Raj Panjabi is Co-Founder/CEO of Last Mile Health and Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

At age 9, Dr. Panjabi escaped a civil war in his home country of Liberia. He returned as a 24- year-old medical student to serve the people he had left behind, co-founding Last Mile Health, an affiliate of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Last Mile Health saves lives in the world's most remote communities by partnering with governments to design, scale and advocate for national networks of community health professionals. Dr. Panjabi and Last Mile Health's work has been published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, the Lancet, JAMA, and PLoS Medicine and has been featured by TIME, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, NPR and the New York Times.

In 2016, TIME Magazine and President Bill Clinton named Dr. Panjabi to its annual list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”, recognizing Last Mile Health's work "to put a health care worker within reach of everyone everywhere." In 2015, Fortune Magazine named Dr. Panjabi one of the "World’s 50 Greatest Leaders," recognizing Last Mile Health's work to support Liberian Government to build a national community health workforce. Dr. Panjabi is a Forbes 400 Philanthropy Fellow, a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Social Entrepreneur, and an Echoing Green Fellow. He is a recipient of the Clinton Global Citizen Award, Outstanding Recent Alumni Award from Johns Hopkins, the Distinguished Young Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina, and the Global Citizen Movement Award.

Dr. Panjabi is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, received a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and trained in Internal Medicine and Primary Care as a Resident and Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.