Dr Rasanathan is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a public health physician with a strong background in health policy and systems research and extensive experience working at different levels of the World Health Organization and within the wider UN system. During his almost 25 years working in health systems, career highlights have included serving as Incident Manager for WHO for the COVID-19 response in Cambodia, helping to drive the development of the Sustainable Development Goal health agenda while at UNICEF, contributing to the work of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, co-writing the 2008 WHO World Health Report on primary health care, and running meningococcal vaccine trials that enabled vaccine licensure and roll-out in New Zealand.

Dr Rasanathan served as an elected board member of Health Systems Global from 2016-2020, was a Rockefeller Foundation Global Fellow in Social Innovation from 2013-2014 and was a member of the Forum on Microbial Threats of the US National Academy of Medicine from 2017-2023.