Dr Geeta Rao Gupta

United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues

IOACSecretariat@who.int

Biography

Geeta Rao Gupta is a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and Founder and Senior Advisor to the 3D Program for Girls and Women. Dr Rao Gupta is also Senior Advisor to Co-Impact, a global philanthropic collaborative for systems change, with a core focus on gender equality and women’s leadership. Additionally, she Chairs the Advisory Board of WomenLift Health, an initiative to promote women’s leadership in global health, and in 2019 was a lead author for the Lancet Series on Gender Equality, Norms and Health.  

From 2011 to 2016, Dr Rao Gupta served as Deputy Executive Director at UNICEF and for a year before that was a senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prior to that, for over a decade, Dr Rao Gupta was the president of the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW).  

Dr Rao Gupta is the recipient of numerous awards, including Harvard University’s 2006 Anne Roe Award and the 2007 Washington Business Journal’s “Women Who Mean Business” Award. She earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Bangalore University and an M.Phil. and M.A. from the University of Delhi, India.