Keizo Takemi is a member of the House of Councillors of the Japanese parliament, or Diet, where he belongs to the Liberal Democratic Party. He has been a senior fellow with the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE) since 2007, and was a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health from November 2007 to June 2009. Takemi has been involved in various global initiatives including the Commission on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health, Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA), WHO expert working group on R&D Financing, and the international organizing committee of the Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC). He has also been serving as the chair of the parliamentary caucus on Stop TB Partnership and the Asian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (AFPPD).

In 2016, he was appointed to the UN High Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth, and in 2018, to the UHC Financing Advisory Committee for the G20 2019. He has served as Senior Vice Minister for Health, Labour and Welfare, and State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, where he led the initiative to establish the UN Trust Fund for Human Security. Within the LDP, he is Chairperson of the Special Committee on Global Health Strategy of the LDP Policy Research Council, Acting Chairperson of Headquarters for Novel Coronavirus, Acting Chairperson of Project Team for COVID-19 Vaccines and Chairperson of Subcommittee on Governance for Infectious Diseases. In recognition of his contributions to the field over the past decade, he was appointed WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in July 2019.

He is a visiting professor at a number of universities around Japan, and is the co-author of Global Action for Health System Strengthening: Policy Recommendations to the G8 (2009), and has contributed numerous articles in English and Japanese to journals such as The Lancet, Asia-Pacific Review, and Gaiko [Diplomacy].

Since September 2007, he has been serving as the chair of the Executive Committee of JCIE’s Global Health and Human Security Program, a pioneering public-private partnership on global health that was formerly known as the “Study Group on Challenges in Global Health and Japan’s Contributions.”