Keizo Takemi is a member of the House of Councillors, the National Diet of Japan, where he belongs to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and serves as Chair of the Special Committee on Global Health Strategy. He was a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health from November 2007 to June 2009. He is also a visiting professor at a number of universities in Japan, including Nagasaki University.

Professor Takemi served in the first Abe administration’s cabinet as Senior Vice Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare. He led the initiative to establish the United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security when he was State Secretary for Foreign Affairs in 1999 and was subsequently named by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to serve as a member of the High-Level Panel on United Nations System-Wide Coherence in Areas of Development, Humanitarian Assistance and the Environment. Since 2007, he has been a senior fellow with the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE), where he is the Chair of the Executive Committee of the Global Health and Human Security Program. 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.