Wendy Taylor

Wendy Taylor has worked for the last 20 years catalyzing innovations to tackle some of the world’s toughest global health challenges and utilizing market-based solutions to scale for impact. In 2017, she was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to explore how to advance opportunities in artificial intelligence, digital health and data technologies to transform global health, including applying advanced outbreak analytics to pandemic threats enabling effective outbreak prediction, earlier detection and precision response.

Joining the Obama Administration in 2010 as a presidential appointee, Wendy founded and built the Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to apply innovative, business-minded approaches to accelerate the development, introduction and scale-up of priority global health innovations. As Director of the Center, she spearheaded multiple Grand Challenges to globally crowdsource groundbreaking solutions to tough health problems – from maternal and newborn health to Ebola to Zika and Future Threats – investing $140 million in new innovations. She also created the agency’s first advance purchase commitments to stimulate investments in vaccines and diagnostics and created multiple public private partnerships with corporations from GSK and McCann Health to Coca-Cola to expand and strengthen health markets.

In 2004, she founded Bio Ventures for Global Health (BVGH), a non-profit working to engage the biopharmaceutical industry in developing medicines for diseases of the developing world. At BVGH, Wendy accelerated global health research and development by building partnerships, identifying market opportunities for industry engagement and advancing the development or implementation of new market incentives including the first Advance Market Commitment and FDA’s Priority Review Voucher program. She also held senior positions with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) – where she negotiated the third reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) on behalf of the biotech industry and developed the organization’s first global health program – and Malaria No More, and she worked in both the executive and legislative branches of the US government, including the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means.

Wendy currently serves on the boards of Last Mile Health, D-Rev and Bio Ventures for Global Health and on several advisory boards, including UNICEF’s Products and Markets Advisory Board and the Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Science and Policy Group. She received a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University and a B.A. from Duke University.