Kalpana Balakrishnan
Chair, Future Earth India National Committee /Dean (Research) & Director, World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Occupational and Environmental Health; ICMR Centre for Advanced Research on Air Quality, Climate and Health; Sri Ramachandra Institute for Higher Education and Research
Professor Balakrishnan acquired her undergraduate education at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India and subsequently her doctoral and post-doctoral training at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, USA. Over the last 28 years, she has 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. She is currently 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. Her primary research involvement has been in the area of air pollution and health and chemical risk assessment. She has 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, she has also 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. She has been a recipient multiple center of excellence grants from national and international funding agencies. She is globally acclaimed for her contributions on (i) developing novel exposure assessment approaches to characterize the complex exposures experienced by rural and urban populations in low and middle income countries (ii) designing and conducting strategic epidemiological investigations in India to catalyze policy level actions by leveraging across the national and global pools of evidence and (iii) informing the climate change and human health discourse using a co-benefits approach. She has led and served as a member in many 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. She serves in more than dozen National and Global Technical Review Committees across multiple countries. She currently serves as a member of the National Steering Committee on Air Pollution Related Issues for Health Effects for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of India and the Indian Council for Medical Research led National Task Force for assessment of impact of initiatives to promote clean household energy. She has published more than 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, she has been ranked for the last five consecutive years among the top 2% of scientists in the field of General and Internal Medicine in an independent study conducted by Stanford University. She is a distinguished fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences She is a recipient of numerous awards including the Clarivate India Research Excellence Citation award (2021), 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. She has 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. Her current portfolio is 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 to scale research capacities at SRIHER to enable ranking as an Institute of Eminence within the next 5 years.