Rick Bright
The Power List 2021 – Biopharmaceuticals
Senior Vice President, Pandemic Prevention & Response, Health Initiative at the Rockefeller Foundation
Bright joined The Rockefeller Foundation in March 2021 to lead the development of the Foundation’s pandemic data and action platform, which will help prevent future pandemics by identifying and responding to the earliest alerts of a disease outbreak and stopping it in the first 100 days. He has extensive experience in global public health and most recently served the US Department of Health and Human Services as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and Director of the esteemed Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Bright resigned from government service in protest against the Trump administration’s approach to handling the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically over the level of political interference in science and the spread of inaccurate information that he said was “dangerous, reckless and causing lives to be lost.”