Senior Fellow
Dr. Mukesh Chawla is a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation contributing to a range of international initiatives focused on pandemic preparedness, health security, health financing, and resilient health systems. He is an economist and global health policy expert with more than four decades of experience spanning government, academia, international development, and global health security. Prior to the UN Foundation, he served for 23 years at the World Bank, most recently as Adviser in Health and Chief Adviser for Health Security, where he led work on pandemic preparedness financing, surveillance systems, emergency response, and health system resilience. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a member of the Indian Administrative Service and a research faculty member at Harvard University.
Dr. Chawla has played a leading role in several global initiatives, including the Global Health Security Agenda, the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility, the International Working Group on Financing Preparedness, and vaccine readiness efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. His recent work has focused on the development and application of pandemic risk assessment approaches, including the integration of epidemiological, economic, and policy dimensions of risk to inform preparedness investments and decision-making under uncertainty. He has also contributed to the design of risk-based financing approaches that align financial incentives with early detection, transparent reporting, and proactive management of emerging biological threats.
