Ricardo Baptista Leite

Dr Ricardo Baptista Leite is the CEO of ‘Health AI – The Global Agency for Responsible AI in Health’.

Dr Baptista Leite is a Portuguese Canadian medical doctor with extensive experience in global health, health systems, infectious diseases and science-based policy-making. Before joining Health AI, he was a 4-term Member of Parliament in Portugal, on both health and foreign affairs committees. He is a city councillor in Sintra, having served in the past as deputy mayor of Cascais.

Dr Baptista Leite is also the founder and president of ‘UNITE Parliamentarians Network for Global Health’, a network of current and former policy-makers from +100 countries in collaboration with the WHO. With more than 15 years of academic experience, he is chair of the ‘Harvard-Charité Global Health Policy Lab’, based in Berlin, and Chair of the ‘Centre for Global Health’ at NOVA University Information Management and Data Science School (NOVA IMS), based in Lisbon.

In the past, he was head of public health at Catolica University of Portugal, founder of ‘Creating Health – Research and Innovation Funding’ and a consultant at a multinational health software house; having completed post-graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Medical School, among others. Prior to his role in parliament, Dr Baptista Leite was a practicing physician for seven years, including a 5-year infectious diseases residency and an internship at the World Health Organization. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he volunteered as a medical doctor in the Cascais Hospital COVID Emergency Room from March 2020 to May 2021. In the summer of 2022, he served as a volunteer at the Lviv Regional Hospital to support humanitarian efforts during the ongoing war in Ukraine.