Rajeev Venkayya

Rajeev Venkayya, M.D., is the CEO of Aerium Therapeutics. Aerium is a building a pipeline of biologics and small molecule antivirals focused on protecting the world against pandemic and epidemic threats.

Previously, Venkayya was President, Global Vaccine Business Unit, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, where he managed a vertically integrated business with all functions necessary for the development, manufacturing, and commercialization of Takeda’s vaccines. Takeda’s development pipeline includes vaccine candidates for dengue, norovirus, Zika (funded by the U.S. government), and Sabin-strain inactivated polio vaccine (funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).Before that, he was director of Vaccine Delivery at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he oversaw the foundation’s top priorities of polio eradication and new vaccine introduction. Earlier in his career, Venkayya was the special assistant to the president and senior director for biodefense at the White House, where he led biodefense policy development and implementation including the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza. He first came to Washington in 2002 through the nonpartisan White House Fellows program. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an independent board member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Venkayya served as an assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and as co-director of the medical intensive care unit and director of the high-risk asthma clinic at San Francisco General Hospital.

Venkayya completed the six-year B.S./M.D. program at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and was chief medical resident in internal medicine at the University of Michigan.