Ramanan LaxminarayanN LAXMINARAYAN is an engineer, economist and epidemiologist whose work focuses on shared global resources, including antimicrobial effectiveness, pandemic preparedness and vaccine access. He is president of the One Health Trust, a global research organization based in Washington, D.C. and Bangalore, and a Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University.

He has advised governments, the World Health Organization and the United Nations on global health policy and served on the antimicrobial resistance working group of the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and on the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.

A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of more than 400 scientific publications, he has spent his career at the intersection of biology, medicine and economics. In Bacteria to Buddha, he brings those disciplines together with neuroscience and contemplative traditions to explore a deeper question: how cooperation shaped consciousness and made us who we are.