India

Site Institution: Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research (SRIHER), Indian Institute Of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay)
Research Areas: Environment Health, Air Pollution

Site Description: SRIHER is a leading medical university in Chennai, India, housing faculties of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, allied health sciences, biomedical sciences, nursing, and physiotherapy on a single campus, supported by a 1,000-bed super-specialty hospital and more than 100 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. The Department of Environmental Health Engineering (EHE) at SRIHER is an internationally recognized center for environmental health research, accredited as a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Occupational and Environmental Health and as a Centre for Advanced Research in Environmental Health by the Indian Council of Medical Research. A decade-long collaboration with UC Berkeley, supported by the NIH Fogarty International Center, produced significant capacity building in household air pollution and health effects research in resource-limited settings, and led to the development of one of the few MPH programs in Occupational and Environmental Health available in India. With nine faculty members, 40 research staff, and extensive laboratory and field infrastructure, EHE has built deep capacity in air pollution epidemiology, exposure assessment, environmental chemistry, and occupational medicine. Trainees engage in population-level field research across multiple sites throughout India, including studies on indoor air pollution, household energy, and respiratory health outcomes.

IIT Delhi is the leading higher education institution in India, recognized as an Institution of Eminence by the Government of India, with over 12,000 students and 650 faculty members across departments, centers, and schools. The Centre for Atmospheric Sciences (CAS) at IIT Delhi is a world-class training and research center in environmental health, with 17 faculty members and active collaborations with UC Berkeley and other leading US research organizations including NCAR, NOAA GFDL, NASA Goddard, and JPL. CAS operates state-of-the-art air quality and atmospheric laboratories housing instruments for NASA's MAIA mission and participation in the NASA AERONET network, enabling trainees to develop exposure models and assess pollutant effects in real time. SANJEEVANI, a new Centre for Advanced Research funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research (Oct 2025 to Oct 2030), focuses on clean air and health research and provides GHES trainees with direct access to an interdisciplinary team of researchers and policymakers. IIT Delhi also anchors the CAPHER network, a collaborative for air pollution and health effects research established with All India Institute of Medical Sciences, further broadening fellows' engagement in policy-relevant environmental health science.

IIT Bombay, established in 1958 in Powai, Mumbai, is one of India's premier technical research universities and a recognized center of academic excellence. The Environmental Science and Engineering Department (ESED), operating since 1977, is an interdisciplinary research and training hub with core focus areas in aerosol science and air quality, water and wastewater management, environmental modeling, and environmental policy. IIT Bombay leads the development of PAVITRA, an air pollution management and intervention tool developed in collaboration with UC Berkeley, which pairs an emissions inventory with a modeling platform that converts changes in emissions to changes in pollution concentrations, supporting policy decisions with direct public health implications. This collaboration with UC Berkeley positions IIT Bombay as a natural GHES training partner, offering fellows hands-on experience in exposure modeling, data-driven policy analysis, and environmental health research in one of the world's most pollution-affected urban settings.

Site Institution: Ashoka University
Research Areas: Responsible Data Science & AI, Health Informatics & Clinical Decision Support, Child & Environmental Health, and Computational Disease Modeling

Site Description: Ashoka University is a leading interdisciplinary research university in India dedicated to advancing Biology, Data Science, Economics, Liberal Arts, and Public Policy. With a strong emphasis on world-class research and cross-disciplinary collaboration, Ashoka serves as an emerging regional training hub for health challenges in South Asia. The university intends to join the GHES network in 2026, building on a long-standing partnership with Yale University that has fostered sustained academic exchange in global health, data science, and interdisciplinary research.

Ashoka's research ecosystem is anchored by two key units: the Trivedi School of Biosciences and the Koita Centre for Digital Health (KCDH-A), which together provide a robust platform for training at the interface of biology, technology, and population health. The university houses advanced imaging ecosystems, next-generation sequencing platforms, mass spectrometry and metabolomics instrumentation, and high-performance computing infrastructure (NVIDIA-enabled systems) with secure data systems and machine learning tools for large-scale health datasets. An active Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Ethics Committee oversee all research involving human and animal participants. Research areas relevant to GHES include Responsible Data Science & AI, Infectious Diseases, Respiratory & Pulmonary Health, Environmental Health, and One Health & Global Health Security.

Trainees engage in AI/ML model development, real-world data analytics and interoperability, clinical decision support, and implementation science using diverse clinical and population datasets, with opportunities to contribute to ongoing projects in disease modeling, population health studies, and digital health systems.

Other features of this site include:

• The Koita Centre for Digital Health focuses on AI/ML in healthcare, genomics, health data systems, and responsible use of health data, with research spanning public health disease surveillance, cardiometabolic disease, and data-driven scalable solutions for health systems strengthening.
• Ashoka's Research and Development Office (RDO), together with departmental administration, provides comprehensive grants management, financial oversight, procurement, IRB coordination, and support for international MOUs and research agreements — meeting the compliance standards required under NIH-funded programs.
• Ashoka University demonstrates strong institutional commitment to trainee success through protected faculty mentorship time, dedicated workspace, interdisciplinary coursework, workshops and seminars, and comprehensive administrative support for trainee visas, onboarding, and logistics.

Site Institution: Christian Medical College Vellore (CMC)
Research Areas: Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Tropical & Enteric Diseases, and Health Policy & Economics

Site Description: Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore is a premier medical institution with a 5-star rating from the National Accreditation Council and the University Grants Commission of India, consistently ranked among the top three medical colleges in the country. CMC is a new partner to the GHES consortium, building on long-standing collaborations with Stanford University including joint Gates Foundation-funded projects since 2019 and NIH R01 funding since 2024. The institution operates over 2,700 beds across two tertiary care facilities in Vellore, seeing more than 1,600,000 patients annually, alongside an extensive network of secondary and primary care field sites serving communities across the Vellore district.

CMC offers an exceptional research infrastructure supporting over 500 active sponsored projects from 55 national and international agencies, including the NIH, Wellcome Trust, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The institution has held multiple NIH Fogarty D43 awards and currently holds several NIH R01s and a U01 across disease areas including enteric fever, parasitology, zoonoses, and emerging infectious diseases. Key facilities include the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory — a national and supranational reference center — with state-of-the-art microbiology, molecular biology, immunology, and next-generation sequencing capabilities. The institution maintains a Demographic Surveillance System (DSS) tracking approximately 500,000 residents, spatially enabled geocoded databases covering over 30 years of census and health data, and GCP-trained staff with REDCap infrastructure for high-quality data capture. Research areas relevant to GHES include Enteric Diseases & Infectious Disease Epidemiology, One Health, Vector-Borne Diseases, and Environmental Health.

Trainees are uniquely positioned to engage in rigorous field and laboratory research, including an ongoing 72,000-participant cluster-randomized vaccine trial and community-based epidemiological studies spanning microbiology and public health. As a WHO Collaborating Center, CMC offers formal graduate education in public health — including an MPH (since 2009) and a PhD in Public Health (since 2013) — with fellows able to participate in lectures, workshops, and community site visits throughout the year. CMC is deeply committed to trainee success, providing dedicated research space, access to core facilities, assistance with grant preparation and submission, and comprehensive support for visiting researchers including housing, transportation, onboarding, and visa guidance.

Site Institution: Public Health Research Institute of India (PHRII)

Research Areas: Infectious Diseases, Chronic Diseases; Cervical Cancer; Maternal Child Health; HIV/AIDS, STIs; Slum Health And Health Disparities In Rural Populations

Site Description:

The Public Health Research Institute of India (PHRII) was established in 2007 to improve the health of Indian women through research and healthcare on issues affecting women’s lives across their lifespan. Founded as a non-profit Charitable Trust, PHRII has been recognized as a Scientific and Industrial Research Organization by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Government of India. We have existing collaborations with the Government of India National Rural Health Mission, District Health & Family Welfare Officer, Rotary International, several community-based organizations, and academic institutions. The Institute also operates

the Prerana Reproductive Health Clinic offering free outpatient services for family planning, reproductive healthcare, cancer screening, and HIV prevention to low-income communities in and around Mysore. PHRII has a full-service laboratory with microbiological, serological, and PCR services for the diagnosis of STI/HIV and conducting Hybrid Capture Assays for HPV DNAdetection. In addition, it operates mobile clinics providing reproductive healthcare in a rural catchment of more than 144 rural villages Mysore District.

Our research infrastructure has also allowed us to increase our community footprint. We have leveraged projects on prenatal care, nutrition, HIV, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease to offer prevention, treatment, and referral services. These include screening women for anaemia, sexually transmitted and reproductive tract infections, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Several large chronic disease studies have also increased our community capacity for preventing non-communicable diseases. We now offer education programs on risk factors for and causes of heart disease and stroke. These include hypertension and Body Mass Index (BMI) screenings, free resting electrocardiograms, and serum glucose testing in the community. In recent years, PHRII has also been collaborating with important stakeholders like Rotary Mysore on another important objective: reducing the burden and death toll from cervical cancer. Cervical cancer is a leading cause of cancer death for Indian women, accounting for about one-in-five cancer deaths among females aged 30 to 69 years. Although it is completely preventable, survival is poor because of late diagnosis and treatment. Low-income women, the group with the highest burden of disease, face the greatest obstacles in accessing cervical cancer screening and treatment services. With the dedicated team, thousands of women have received free screening for cervical cancer at PHRII mobile medical camps—and those found to have pre-cancers have been treated the same day or referred for additional care.

We have carried out more than 7,000 cervical cancer screenings till date out of which, 112 women needed additional follow-up testing as we detected abnormalities. We also treated more than 50 women with cryotherapy for precancerous lesions. All women needing further work-up and follow-up care were managed at JSS hospital, Mysore, or Cheluvamba hospital, Mysore, both of which are long-term collaborators of PHRII. All the staff at our organization are trained in cervical cancer prevention and health screening, and have longstanding expertise conducting awareness programs in both urban and rural communities. Our counsellors are well trained in motivating and educating the women to undergo screening after providing awareness with materials specially designed for low literacy populations. We also identify women in each community with health and leadership qualities and train them as peer educators for prevention of cervical cancer. This has helped us make cervical cancer programs sustainable in many of the areas where we work.

Other features of the site include:

• PHRII has served as a training site for undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and post-doctoral fellows in collaboration with several US Universities. PHRII has partnered with numerous universities to host Global Health Study Abroad programs focusing on India’s health system and global health research methods. We have also hosted Fulbright research fellows. The PHRII consortium has experienced faculty mentors currently conducting laboratory, clinical, epidemiological, and community-based research and has hosted over 16 pre- and postdoctoral fellows, and 80 students from universities. These students from different backgrounds spend between six weeks to a year onsite to learn and carry out culturally appropriate community-based and biomedical research projects.
• PHRII with JSSAHER, also known as PHRII consortium for this application is also involved in Global Infectious Diseases (GID) training program to establish a research and training focused on the study of the interaction of Infectious Diseases (IDs) with Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) in Mysore, India. This training program supports post-graduate research, training and capacity building in India to generate a new, focused set of researchers and projects addressing this growing and important health challenge. To date, three fellows have been trained at University of California at Berkeley.
• PHRII Serology, Microbiology, and Molecular laboratories are located in an air-conditioned 1500 sq. ft. space at the institute’s headquarters in Yadavagiri, Mysore. Dr. Anjali Arun, a Pathologist with more than 25 years of experience, oversees the 3 Masters-level technicians at the facility. Equipment includes a minus 80 freezer, 2 refrigerators, an Elisa Reader and Washer, a Biosafety Cabinet, a Thermal Cycler, an Electrophoresis system, a Photo-documentation System, Precision Balances, Vortex apparatus, Centrifuges, an all-purpose autoclave, a VDRL Rotator, Multichannel Pipettes, Regular Pipettes and Pipettors, an Incubator, Trinocular and Binocular Microscopes, and all the equipment required to carry out basic microbiology and biochemistry procedures for diagnosis of STI, HIV and other infectious diseases. In addition, the laboratory has an Uninterruptible Power Supply capable of providing 6 hours of backup, as well as a portable generator to ensure uninterrupted operation of the - 80 freezer.
• PHRII operates the Prerana Reproductive Health Clinic in a 1000 sq. ft. facility located in central Mysore City. The clinic has two fully equipped clinician examination rooms, a stat lab, two counseling rooms, and a waiting room. Equipment includes a computer, printer, scanner, incubator, binocular microscope, refrigerator, sterilizer, and microwave oven. The clinic is open 5 days each week and is staffed by 3 female doctors, 2 nurses, a social worker, and a laboratory technician.
• PHRII is equipped with 6 desktop computers and 12 laptop computers on a Wireless LAN connection to the world wide web. Additionally, the institute has 2 network printers, 2 scanners, and a network server for data backup. PHRII equipment and software are maintained through a local software consulting company. PHRII has more than 5,000 sq. ft of office space, conference rooms, a training center, and a teleconferencing facility. The office also includes a kitchenette and guest room for visiting scholars. PHRII carries out community outreach, education, and research programs throughout Mysore Taluk. To support those efforts the institute has an LCD projector, two laptop computers, screens, four handheld GPS systems, and one Maruti 8-seater van.

Recent research projects include:

• Neurocognitive Symptoms in COVID19 recovered patients in Mysore district, Karnataka
• Yoga for Healthy Aging (YHA) Study: A Mind-Body Intervention to Reduce Multimorbidity in the Elderly
• Survey to know COVID 19 vaccine uptake decision process, hesitancy, knowledge and attitude towards vaccine among the Slum dwellers, Pregnant women and parents of children between 3-17 years in Mysore district
• Self-sampling of HPV DNA testing for cervical cancer screening among women in Mysore district
• Experience of Diabetes in Young Adults in Mysore District.
• Understanding Genetic Diversity in the Mysore region of India: a Pilot Project
• Increasing Maternal Support during Prenatal, Birth and Postnatal periods in Mysore district, Karnataka
• A qualitative study to explore the reproductive health challenges among non-pregnant women tobacco farm laborers in Mysore District, India
• Women's Stress in South India: Year Three
• The Kadime Ottada (Low Pressure) Study: Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training for Hypertension in Older Adults in Rural Mysore, India