Rajeev Venkayya

Dr. Rajeev Venkayya was appointed Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Biodefense in May, 2005. Dr Venkayya is a member of the White House Homeland Security Council, and reports to Frances Townsend, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. He also serves as an advisor to Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He has served as one of thirteen non-partisan White House Fellows appointed by President Bush from 2002-03.

Dr. Venkayya is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is board certified and licensed to practice Pulmonary Medicine and Critical Care Medicine, and returns to UCSF annually as an attending physician in the Medical Intensive Care Unit and the Pulmonary Consult Service at San Francisco General Hospital.

Prior to moving to Washington, Dr. Venkayya was an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at UCSF. He held his primary appointment at San Francisco General Hospital, where he was Co-Director of the Medical Intensive Care Unit, Founder and Director of the High-Risk Asthma Clinic, and the principal investigator for a five-year research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the immunologic mechanisms leading to asthma.

Dr. Venkayya founded two companies while at UCSF: Sapient Medical Group, Inc., a physician services corporation, and Neomedicus, LLC, a medical technology consulting and design firm. Through Neomedicus, he created “What’s Asthma All About?”, a web-based movie that has been used for asthma education by people around the globe.

Dr. Venkayya completed his fellowship training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at UCSF. He was a resident and Chief Medical Resident in Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical Center. He completed his undergraduate and medical school education in the 6 year B.S./M.D. program at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, where he was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha honorary medical society. He graduated as one of three valedictorians of Fairborn High School in 1985. He is an Eagle Scout.