Public Health Foundation of India

Rakhi Dandona, PhD is Professor at the Public Health Foundation of India and Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, USA.

Prof. Dandona has led and contributed to a variety of epidemiological studies and health system studies in India for over twenty-five years, including communicable and non-communicable diseases and injuries.  Perinatal health and injuries are her major research interests over the last decade, with focus on epidemiology and broader determinants of road injuries, suicide, neonatal mortality and stillbirths.

Prof. Dandona has held a variety of grants for public health research including from the Wellcome Trust, UK, the National Institutes of Health, USA, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  She has over 250 peer-reviewed publications.  Prof. Dandona is an Associate Editor for the journal Injury Prevention, and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Lancet Psychiatry and The Lancet Public Health.  She has previously served as Associate Professor at the University of Sydney School of Public Health and Head of Research at the George Institute for International Health India.  She obtained her PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Prof. Dandona is Board Member of the International Stillbirth Alliance.  She serves as Chair of the GBD India Injury Expert Group for the India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative, which is a collaboration between Indian Council of Medical Research, Public Health Foundation of India, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and about 100 institutions.  She is member of the Technical Advisory Group of the National Data Quality Forum which has the mandate to improve quality of health data in India.  Prof. Dandona is member of the World Health Organization Task Force on improving cause of death, World Health Organization Task Force on verbal autopsy methods, the Expert Committee of the Health Ministry in India to improve vital registration, and the Technical Advisory Group of the Government of the state of Bihar in India for health system response to address gender-based violence.  She has served on the Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation (RIGHT) Funding Committee of the National Institute for Health Research, UK, and on the national selection committee for the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowships.