Dr. Pannu is an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Her primary areas of research include global health security and biosecurity, pandemic prevention and preparedness, and emerging technology security and governance. She has served as a subject-matter expert for the National Academies of Sciences, the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, Google AI, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, among others.
Dr. Pannu completed her MD, global health residency training, and health policy subspecialty fellowship at Stanford University. She is a licensed and board-certified internal medicine physician and served as a front-line physician during the COVID-19 pandemic; she previously held an Ugandan medical license due to her work at multiple Ugandan national referral hospitals and clinics.
Dr. Pannu regularly briefs government officials and policymakers on emerging technologies with biosecurity implications, including artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. She is a member of the EU AI Office Scientific Panel which advises the European Commission, and has testified in front of the U.S. House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. Dr. Pannu has authored/co-authored over 50 publications, including peer-reviewed research, reports, and commentaries on issues related to biosecurity and emerging technology that have been published in Science, Nature, and the New York Times, among others. Dr. Pannu serves on the board of Blueprint Biosecurity, a philanthropically funded nonprofit dedicated to achieving breakthroughs in humanity's ability to prevent pandemics, as well as previously served on the board of Biohub, a nonprofit research organization with 4 US campuses focused on AI for biomedicine.
