Ramanan Laxminarayan is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, where he directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy, and a visiting scholar and lecturer at Princeton University. His research deals with the integration of epidemiological models of infectious diseases and drug resistance into the economic analysis of public health problems. He has worked to improve understanding drug resistance as a problem of managing a shared global resource.

Laxminarayan has worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank on evaluating malaria treatment policy, vaccination strategies, the economic burden of tuberculosis, and control of non-communicable diseases. He has served on a number of advisory committees at WHO, Centers for Disease Control and, Prevention, and the Institute of Medicine. In 2003-04, he served on the National Academy of Science/Institute of Medicine Committee on the Economics of Antimalarial Drugs and subsequently helped create the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria, a novel financing mechanism for antimalarials. His work has been covered in major media outlets including Associated Press, BBC, CNN, the Economist, LA Times, NBC, NPR, Reuters, Science, Wall Street Journal, and National Journal.