Kalpana Balakrishnan

I acquired my undergraduate education at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India and subsequently my doctoral and post-doctoral training at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, USA. Over the last 28 years, I have established one of the largest inter-disciplinary occupational and environmental health research groups in India, at the Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai. I am engaged in research and training collaborations with a network of more than 50 national and international institutional partners to address national and global health research priorities. My primary research involvement has been in the area of air pollution and health and chemical risk assessment. I have designed and conducted large scale field studies concerning the household, ambient and occupational environment across multiple states in India, including monitoring and evaluation of intervention efforts. Recently, I have been engaged in the conduct of mother-child cohort studies as well multi-country randomized control trials to strengthen the evidence for efficacy of air pollution interventions on birth/early childhood and adult cardio-vascular outcomes. My primary scientific contributions are centered on (i) developing novel exposure assessment approaches to characterize the complex exposures experienced by rural and urban populations in low and middle income countries and (ii) designing and conducting strategic epidemiological investigations in India to catalyze policy level actions by leveraging across the national and global pools of evidence. I am actively involved in on-going national and international technical assessments concerned with air quality and health, including the Global Burden of Disease and Comparative Risk Assessments, The World Health Organisation Air Quality Guidelines, The International Agency for Research on Cancer Monographs, The Global Energy Assessments, UNEP Asia Pacific Regional Assessments and the India State level Burden of Disease Initiative. I also hold key advisory roles such as serving as a review committee member for the Office the Principal Scientific Advisor to Govt. of India, member of the Health Effects Institute (US) Global Health Oversight Committee and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) Technical Advisory Board. Most recently, I have assumed the role of Editor in Chief for the Journal of Health and Pollution being published out of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), USA. I have published nearly 200 scientific articles in high impact peer-reviewed journals as well as book chapters and training manuals that have merited an H-index of 60, more than 80,000 citations and several million views to date. Since 2020, I have been ranked among the top 2% of scientists in the field of General and Internal Medicine in the annual global ranking study being conducted by Stanford University. My other notable recognitions include being awarded the Clarivate India Research Excellence Citation award (2021), being elected as a Fellow of National Academy Of Medical Sciences. India (2014) and being the recipient of the Public Health Foundation of India award (2008) for Outstanding Scientist in Public Health, The Hari Om Ashram Trust Award(2000) for Outstanding Scientist administered by the University Grants Commission, Govt. of India, the Outstanding Woman Scientist Award(1999) of The Government of Tamil Nadu and The Award for Excellence in Environmental Health Research(1998) administered by Harvard Medical International. I have also led the development of new and novel academic programs at Sri Ramachandra Institute for Higher Education and Research with support from the NIH Fogarty International Center and the Center for International Migration, GIZ that includes Masters programs in Industrial Hygiene and Safety, the BPH and MPH program in Occupational and Environmental Health and BSc (Hons.) program in Environmental Health Sciences. My current plans are focused on building a world class Faculty of Public Health at SRIHER that can jointly provide advanced research and public health practice capacities for a diverse range of students and professionals in public health and inform strategic actions on risk factors contributing to the national health burden. As the Dean (Research), I intend to scale research capacities at SRIHER to enable ranking as an Institute of Eminence within the next 5 years.