Harold Varmus (Chair)
Harold Varmus is president and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Much of his scientific work was conducted during his twenty-three years as a faculty member at the University of California–San Francisco Medical School, where he conducted the research that in 1989 earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Varmus has been a champion of open access to scientific papers—he is co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of the Public Library of Science, a not-for-profit open-access publisher. He is chairman of the Executive Committee of the Scientific Board for the Grand Challenges in Global Health and has played a key role in shaping the program since its inception.

John Bell
John Bell is Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, a position founded by King Henry VIII in 1546. He is chairman of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research, a newly formed body that coordinates the research agendas of the UK's National Health Service and the Medical Research Council and thus serves as a key component of the UK's plan to combine medical research funding under a single organization. He is also currently president of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 1991 Bell founded Oxford University’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics and has since been a board member of Isis Innovation, Oxford University’s technology transfer company. He is the founding director or founder of a number of spinoff companies, such as Powderject (1993), Oxagen (1997), and Avidex (1999), and is a non-executive member of the board of Roche AG. His scientific work focuses on the immune response and the genetics of autoimmune disease. He has contributed work that defined several of the genes involved in diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis susceptibility.

Jay Naidoo
Jay Naidoo is chair of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, chairman of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, and chairman of the J&J Group, a diversified investment and management group based in Johannesburg. He was deeply impacted by and involved with the political situation in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Naidoo served as Minister of Reconstruction and Development in the cabinet of President Mandela, and in 1996 he became Minister of Communications. At the end of his term in South Africa's first democratic parliament, he left politics for the private sector to promote the expansion of an information backbone for the continent's shared vision of an African Renaissance.

Joy Phumaphi
Joy Phumaphi is vice president of the Human Development Network at the World Bank, responsible for the Bank's programs in Health, Nutrition and Population (HNP), Education, and Social Protection. A Botswana national, she began public service in Botswana as a local government auditor. She went on to serve in the Botswanan Parliament and as a representative to the Southern African Development Community. She entered the cabinet with responsibility for lands and housing and developed the first national housing policy. Phumaphi subsequently served as Minister for Health, where she restructured the ministry to make it more focused on results, oversaw revision of the Public Health Act, and put into action a multi-sectoral plan to combat HIV/AIDS. She subsequently joined the World Health Organization as Assistant Director General for Family and Community Health, a position she held until her current role at the World Bank.

Sujatha Rao
Sujatha Rao is Additional Secretary and Director General of National AIDS Control Organization, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. She began her work in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare as director (Media) and later served as joint secretary. In 2004 she was appointed secretary of the National Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, which was co-chaired by the Union Ministers of Finance and Health. The report of this commission is now the basis for much of the health-sector reform under way in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. She was a Takemi Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health during 2001–2002 and has published several papers and articles on health and public policy matters. Rao was recently nominated chair of the Portfolio Committee of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

Daniel Vasella
Daniel Vasella is chairman and CEO of the global healthcare company Novartis, whose business portfolio is strategically focused on novel medicines, high-quality low-cost generics; vaccines and diagnostics; and over-the-counter drugs. He began his career as a practicing physician and then joined Sandoz. In his early years at the company he led the overhaul of Sandoz's research and development model, streamlining and integrating the drug-development process to ensure collaboration among clinical researchers, chemists, and production and marketing managers. Vasella went on to lead one of the largest corporate mergers in history, the $41 billion 1996 union of Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy, which formed Novartis. He has implemented pioneering access to medicine initiatives, contributing more than two percent of Novartis's revenue to corporate social-responsibility activities, making available, below cost, Coartem, the leading artemisinin-containing combination therapy for malaria, and the creation of the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases in Singapore, one of the only research institutions dedicated to researching neglected diseases endemic to the developing world.