Dr. Dorairaj Prabhakaran

Professor Dorairaj Prabhakaran is a cardiologist, epidemiologist, and academician of global standing. He trained at Bangalore Medical College (MBBS) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (MD in Internal Medicine, DM in Cardiology), and earned an MSc in Health Research Methodology from McMaster University in Canada. He serves as Executive Director of the Centre for Chronic Disease Control, a WHO Collaborating Centre for the Southeast Asia region and an ICMR Collaborating Centre of Excellence, and as Distinguished Professor at the Public Health Foundation of India. He also holds professorships at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, and is a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health and an International Fellow at McMaster's Population Research Institute. After a career in patient care and teaching at AIIMS New Delhi, Prof. Prabhakaran built large population-based research programs that have reshaped understanding of chronic disease in India. His work has linked air pollution to several chronic diseases using a high-resolution, machine-learning-based exposure model; illuminated the interplay of genetic and environmental drivers of disease in rapidly urbanizing populations; and shown that heart disease risk is higher among poorer and less-educated groups, arguing that India needs not only social safety nets but springboards for the poor. He now leads efforts to develop low-cost, context-specific solutions for chronic disease care. These include mobile-phone-based personalized patient management, audit-and-feedback programs for physicians, Yoga-based cardiac rehabilitation, a cardiovascular polypill trial for secondary prevention, and capacity-building programs for primary care physicians. Prof. Prabhakaran has authored more than 650 publications in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Circulation, BMJ, Nature, and JAMA, with an h-index of 110. Scopus and India's Department of Science & Technology named him the top researcher in medicine in India by publications for 2009–2014, and Stanford University lists him among the top 2% of researchers worldwide. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and the Royal College of Physicians. His honors include the Quality Champion award from the Quality Council of India and an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Glasgow. He is also widely recognized as an exceptional mentor to doctoral, postdoctoral, and physician-scientists in India and abroad, many of whom have gone on to lead in cardiovascular research.