Indian American Dr. Rajiv Shah Appointed to the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The Rockefeller Foundation president Dr. Rajiv Shah has been appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York board of directors as a Class C director for a three-year term. The Indian American has led The Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropy whose mission is to promote the well-being of people worldwide, since 2017. The foundation “applies data, science, and innovation to improve health for women and children, create nutritious and sustainable food systems, end energy poverty for more than a billion people worldwide, and enable meaningful economic mobility in the United States and around the world,” according to its website. 

Before joining the foundation, Shah was the founder and managing partner of Latitude Capital, a private equity firm focused on infrastructure and energy projects in Africa and Asia. Before that, he served as head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In that role, he served on the National Security Council, led the U.S. responses to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2014 West African Ebola pandemic, and secured bipartisan support for the passage of the Global Food Security Act and the Electrify Africa Act. 

In October, Shah published “Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happen,” where he “shares a dynamic new model for realizing transformative change, inspired by his own work and that of The Foundation on some of the biggest humanitarian efforts of the 21st century.”

He founded Latitude Capital, a private equity firm focused on power and infrastructure projects in Africa and Asia and served as a Distinguished Fellow in Residence at Georgetown University. Previously, he served at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he created the International Financing Facility for Immunization which helped reshape the global vaccine industry and save millions of lives.

Before joining USAID, he served as chief scientist and undersecretary for research, education, and economics at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he created the National Institute for Food and Agriculture. Earlier in his career, he was a director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he created the International Financing Facility for Immunization.

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Shah is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the Wharton School of Business. He served as a distinguished fellow in residence at Georgetown University and has received the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award and the U.S. Global Leadership Award.

(Top photo, courtesy of the University of Michigan)