Nicolette Louissaint
WCAPS Advisory Council Member
Nicolette A. Louissaint, Ph.D. serves as the Executive Director of Healthcare Ready, a nonprofit organization set up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to ensure that the catastrophic breakdowns in patient access to healthcare would never happen again. In this role, she leads the organizations efforts to build greater healthcare preparedness and response efforts in coordination with the public and private sectors. Her particular areas of interest are biosecurity (especially infectious and emerging diseases) and supply chain complexities.
Healthcare Ready drives programs and advocates for policies related to emergency response and healthcare operations. The organization’s programs focus on building community health resilience in times of disaster or pandemic outbreaks through partnerships with healthcare.
Prior to this position, Nicolette served as a Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. Department of State in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. As the lead officer for health intellectual property and trade issues, she advised the State Department’s leadership on issues related to public health, technology transfer and biotechnology. She also worked on policies related to pharmaceutical counterfeiting, pharmaceutical trade, supply chain, climate change and other science and technology development issues.
During the height of the Ebola Epidemic of 2014, Nicolette served as the Senior Advisor to the State Department’s Special Coordinator for Ebola. In this role, she was responsible for coordinating international efforts as the U.S. Department of State’s Ebola Coordination Unit jumpstarted the diplomatic response to the epidemic. She contributed to efforts to raise more than $1 billion in donations to the United Nations Multi-Partner Trust Fund from stakeholders around the world towards the response.
Nicolette holds Bachelors of Science degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biological Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University. She earned a Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, specializing in HIV Clinical Pharmacology from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Johns Hopkins University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was recognized in 2016 as a “40 under 40 leaders in minority health” by the National Minority Quality Forum by the Congressional Black Caucus.
