Krishna Udayakumar, MD, is the founding Director of the Global Health Innovation Center, which is focused on generating deeper evidence and support for the study, scaling, and adaptation of health innovations and policy reforms globally. He is also Executive Director of Innovations in Healthcare, a non-profit co-founded by Duke University, McKinsey & Company, and the World Economic Forum, where he leads the organization’s work to curate and scale the impact of transformative health solutions globally.

Krishna is an Associate Professor of Global Health and Medicine at Duke University and an Associate Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School Singapore. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and Academic Medicine.

Born in Bangalore, India, Krishna spent his childhood in Virginia and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Virginia, where he earned a bachelor’s degree with distinction in interdisciplinary studies. He received both an MD and an MBA (with a concentration in Health Sector Management) from Duke University, where he was a Fuqua Scholar. Krishna completed his residency in internal medicine at Duke and served as Assistant Chief Resident at the Durham VA Medical Center before joining the faculty of Duke University.