Rakhi Dandona
Clinical ProfessorRakhi Dandona, PhD is Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, and a Professor at the Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India.
Prof. Dandona has over two decades of experience in generating empirical evidence on disease burden and risk factor distribution at the population level through epidemiological studies and in health system studies in India. She is particularly interested in helping build evidence for decision-making to maximize population health and health equity in less developed settings. Injuries and perinatal health are her major research interests, with focus on epidemiology and broader determinants of road injuries, suicide, and neonatal mortality and stillbirths. Mental health dimensions of suicide and perinatal mortality are of particular interest.
Prof. Dandona is Chair of the Global Burden of Disease Study 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. The Initiative’s research on gender-differentials in suicide mortality in India received wide, including reports on the published findings in The Economist and the Scientific American. Her work as part of evaluations of large-scale neonatal health interventions in the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh has generated robust evidence for stillbirth estimation and brought attention to the health system related risk factors for stillbirths in India. She is a member of the Stillbirth Advocacy Working Group of the International Stillbirth Alliance.
She has held several grants for public health research including from the Wellcome Trust, UK and the National Institutes of Health, USA. She has over 200 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 as an Academic Editor for the journal PLOS One. She is on the Board of Advisory for the Indian Road Safety Campaign and is a Steering Committee member of the Road Safety Partnership for India, the Global Road Safety initiative of the World Economic Forum and the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile. She has served on the national selection committee for the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowships.
Prof. Dandona 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.
IHME was established at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2007. Its mission is to deliver to the world timely, relevant, and scientifically valid evidence to improve health policy and practice.