Dr. Neil Vora

Neil Vora, MD, is a physician, epidemiologist and conservationist who serves as the Executive Director for Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition (PPATS) and Orchestrator-in-Residence at Integral. He served for nearly a decade with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), through which he deployed to Liberia in 2014 and to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019 to assist in the responses to two of the three largest Ebola outbreaks ever. He also led the investigation of a newly discovered smallpox-like virus in the country of Georgia in 2013. In 2020, Dr. Vora was asked by New York City (NYC) Mayor Bill de Blasio to develop and lead NYC’s COVID-19 contact tracing program, through which he oversaw a team of over 3,000 staff who traced more than 700,000 affected New Yorkers. He still sees patients in a public tuberculosis clinic in New York City. From 2021-2025, he served as a technical fellow and Senior Advisor for One Health at Conservation International.

He has published more than 100 articles in leading outlets such as the New York Times, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet. In 2023, he delivered a TED talk on how stopping deforestation is a critical intervention for preventing pandemics and mitigating climate change. In 2025, he was named to the TIME100 Next list of “World’s Most Influential Rising Stars”. Outside of work, Dr. Vora loves to train in Brazilian jiu jitsu.