Dr. Abhijit Nadkarni
Dr. Abhijit Nadkarni, MBBS, DPM, MRCPsych, MSc (Mental Health Services Research), PhD (Epidemiology), Abhijit is a tenure-track Associate Professor of Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), UK. He is an addiction psychiatrist and global mental health researcher conducting research aimed at developing and evaluating interventions for increasing access to mental healthcare in low resource settings. His host institution in India is Sangath, a mental health research NGO, where he is the Director of the Addictions Research Group. He has trained at the Goa Medical College, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, UK, King’s College London and LSHTM.
He is actively involved in the capacity building of mental health researchers and lay health workers in India and overseas (e.g. Nepal, Kenya, Uganda). He teaches on various MSc courses (Global Mental Health, Public Health Policy) at the LSHTM, and the Course Director for the annual short course on Leadership in Mental Health. He is on the State Mental Health Authority for Goa, and was on the task force of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare that develop the mental health operational guidelines for the Ayushman Bharat Program.
Dr Amar Jesani
Dr Amar Jesani is a medical doctor working as an independent consultant – researcher and teacher – in bioethics and public health, in Mumbai, India. He is one of the founders of the Forum for Medical Ethics Society and its journal, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME; www.ijme.in). He is also its present editor. He is one of the founding trustees of the Anusandhan Trust, which manages the health research institute, CEHAT (Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes – www.cehat.org) in Mumbai, and the health action institute, SATHI (Support for Advocacy and Training to Health Initiatives – www.sathicehat.org), in Pune, India.
Currently, he is a consultant and co-principal investigator (PI) of the Wellcome Trust-supported research project titled “Investigating reproductive ethics-in-context: the Indian experience” with King’s College, London. He has also been researching the impact of torture prevention mechanisms over the last three decades in India, as co-PI of a project supported by the Association for the Prevention of Torture, Geneva. Read more…
Dr Anant Bhan
Dr Anant Bhan is a physician with a masters’ degree in bioethics from the University of Toronto. He is a researcher in global health, bioethics, mental health and health policy. He is also Adjunct Professor, Yenepoya (deemed to be University), Mangaluru, India. Anant was Past President, International Association of Bioethics, 2017-19. His work is focused on ethics and equity in health, mental health, digital health, public health ethics, research ethics, community engagement, ethics of innovative technologies and ethics training for professionals. Anant is based at Bhopal, India. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anant-bhan-53233b11/ and on Twitter @AnantBhan
Dr Calvin WL Ho.
Dr Calvin Ho is Associate Professor with the Faculty of Law, and Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Ethics, at the University of Hong Kong. His research is primarily on the governance of health and biomedical technologies, including human genome editing, human pluripotent stem cell research, and health technologies based on Artificial Intelligence and data analytics. He is an Ethics Board member of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and a member of the COVID-19 Ethics & Governance Working Group of the World Health Organization.
Eunice Kamaara
professor of African Christian Ethics at Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya, is an ethicist with over thirty-year experience in holistic health development participatory research and practice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (1989); Master of Philosophy in Religion (1993); Doctor of Philosophy in African Christian Ethics (2003); Postdoc in Gender Mainstreaming (2004); and Master of Science in International Health Research Ethics (2013). She has expertise in mainstreaming Gender & Diversity for Justice and Inclusivity in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and is passionate about translating research findings into practical development through policy influence and community engagement. Eunice has over thirty years of experience teaching at university level. Her philosophy of teaching is: ‘Teaching is learning for life transformation’. She is a leader in pedagogical skills and has expertise in design, facilitation and assessment of transformative learning-centred online as well as face-to-face teaching and learning
Eunice has consulted in research and also in teaching and learning for local, national and international organizations including the World Council of Churches (WCC), the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Templeton World Charity Foundation Inc. (TWCF), and Institute of Development Studies/Partnership for African Social Governance Research (PASGR) among others. She has served on international boards of Church World Service (New York, US), Theological Book Network (Grand Rapids, MI, US), and currently, on Medecines San Frontieres Ethics Review Board (Barcelona, Spain) and Social Science Research Network (Brookings, NY, US). She has more than 100 publications
Eunice co-directs the African Character Initiation Programme (ACIP), an urban community based and community participatory organization on mentorship of adolescents for holistic health, wellbeing, and values. She advocates for African spirituality (healthy relationships with the self, with other persons, with the Supreme and with all other creation within one’s environment.) as the basis for health and wellbeing. ACIP is recognized by the World Health Organization among the Top 30 2019 Africa Health Innovations http://innov.afro.who.int/innovators/professor-eunice-kamaara-25
Dr Lakshmi Lingam
Dr Lakshmi Lingam is Dean & Professor, School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai
Dr Lakshmi Lingam was the Deputy Director at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), in Hyderabad from May 2011- May 2016. In this position she had provided leadership in envisioning a new campus, hiring new teams of Faculty and researchers, building relationships with the government, non-government organizations and civil society groups, and offering new academic programs that significantly strengthened social sciences education and research.
Dr Lakshmi is a well-known gender specialist. She was a scholar on the International Visitors Leadership program of the USIA; a Fulbright New Century Scholar during 2004-5 and a Nehru-Fulbright Fellow in 2015. Dr Lingam was an Indo-Shastri Visiting Scholar associated with the University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada (2011); Visiting Fellow, Gender, Sexuality and Law Fellowship program, School of Law, Keele University, Keele, North Staffordshire (2007).
Dr Lakshmi Lingam is on the Curriculum Advisory Boards, Executive Committees and Academic Councils of several Indian Universities as well as a member of Technical and Ethical Advisory Boards, Internal Complaints Committees of academic, GO and NGOs. In addition to her outstanding teaching and research activities, she has contributed to gender and equity mainstreaming activities of Government departments in a number of states in India. She was the General Secretary of the Indian Association for Women Studies during the period 2000 -2002. Dr Lakshmi was a member of the National Resource Group of the Government of India, Mahila Samakhya program for women’s empowerment under the Ministry of HRD.
Dr Lakshmi has undertaken several national and international research projects, evaluation studies and has travelled widely within and outside the country for carrying out research, giving lectures and participating in conferences. She has published widely in national and international peer-reviewed journals and supervises several research students.
Lisa Schwartz
Lisa Schwartz, Professor, Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact
● Professor, Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, Faculty of Health Sciences
● Member, Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis (CHEPA), Faculty of Health Sciences
● Member, Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis (CHEPA), Faculty of Health Sciences
● Associate Member, Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities
Mala Ramanathan
Mala Ramanathan ([email protected]) Dr Mala Ramanathan has been on the faculty of the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies (AMCHSS), Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since October 1996. She is currently Professor at the AMCHSS
She has a Masters’ in Statistics from the University of Madras (1984) as also an M Phil (1989) and PhD (1993) in Population Sciences from the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai. She also has a Masters’ in Medical Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam (1998). She has undergone Bioethics training as an Ethics Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston (2002-04). She is part of a larger group affiliated to the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics that engages with bioethics issues in general and research ethics in particular.
She has developed and taught several modules on gender and health and qualitative research methods as part of the Masters’ in Public Health Programme at the AMCHSS. She is a visiting Professor at the Centre for Bioethics and Culture, SIUT, Karachi where she teaches research and public health ethics. She has been part of an ICMR initiative for training in social science research in health around the country.
Her specific research interests are sexual and reproductive health and gender issues in health and she specialises in using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to addressing research questions. She has received research grants from several sources such as the MacArthur Foundation, the WHO-SEARO and the Government of India. Her recent research projects include ‘Impact of type 2 diabetes on lives and wellbeing of women’ funded by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India and ‘MTP/EC services for women in a population in reproductive health transition: Providers’ and institutions’ perspectives’ funded by the Indian Council for Medical Research, New Delhi. She has published extensively in areas of women’s health and bioethics, particularly public health and research ethics.
She has been a member of the IEC for the Health Action for People, Thiruvananthapuram, since April 2013, and was a member of the SCTIMST-IEC for five years from 2004-2008. She is currently the member secretary of the IEC, SCTIMST since June 2014.
She has served on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics for eight years from 2006-2014. Since June 2014, she has been a Working Editor for the journal, involved in facilitating editorial decisions. She lives and works out of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India.
Sandhya Srinivasan
Ms Sandhya Srinivasan is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist and researcher with a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy (Bryn Mawr College, USA) and Master’s degrees in sociology (University of Bombay) and public health (Columbia University, USA).
She has been a journalist since 1986, writing primarily on public health and medical ethics, in academic journals and in the general media. She was executive editor of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics from 1998 to 2011 and is currently consulting editor of the journal. She has also been consulting editor for Infochange News & Features, published by the Centre for Communication and Development Studies (CCDS), and for Scroll.in, a digital daily of political and cultural news from India.
In 2002-3, she was an Ashoka Fellow for her work in medical ethics. From 2007 to 2011, she was a member of the faculty of the Centre for Studies in Ethics and Rights. She has served on the institutional ethics committees of the National Institute for Research in Reproduction and of the Anusandhan Trust.
Ms Srinivasan’s Master’s thesis in 1997 was on the fertility industry in India, a topic further explored in a Panos Reproductive Health Media Fellowship in 1998. In 2010, she edited a collection of papers on this subject for the Sama Resource Group for Women and Health (Zubaan, 2010). She has also written extensively on ethical and regulatory issues in clinical trials in India.
She has conducted research and written for Panos South Asia, UNAIDS, UNICEF, the United Nation Research Institute for Social Development, Wemos Foundation, Somo Foundation, IPAS, and the Council of Social Development. In 2014-15, she supervised a Ford Foundation funded study for CCDS on internet access in Pune slums.
Ms Srinivasan has conducted classes on publication ethics and responsible research for the University of Mumbai, the Yenepoya-Fogarty master’s programme in research ethics, TISS, FMES and other organisations.
She is a member of the Network of Women in the Media-India, the Indian Association of Medical Journal Editors, and the World Association of Medical Editors. She is a member of the editorial board of Developing World Bioethics and a member of the international advisory board of Research Ethics.
Selected publications by Sandhya Srinivasan
Dr Srijit Mishra
Dr Srijit Mishra PhD (Professor, IGIDR; former Director, NCDS) researches and teaches on development-related issues that intertwine between social philosophy, analytical measurement and applied development. He has been instrumental in spearheading the Odisha Millets Mission that brought together the Government, civil society and the Academia for a pro-people action research initiative that works in four verticals – production, processing, marketing and consumption. His work on cyclone Fani, as part of a multi-disciplinary team involving the Government of Odisha and many multilateral agencies, dealt with macroeconomic and human impact that has important methodological and policy implications. His work on farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra led to the setting-up of Vasantrao Naik Kshetkari Swabhilambhan Mission and other policy outcomes, including the deliberations leading to debt waiver. Some of his publications are on agrarian issues, measurement of development indicators, and poverty among others. He has been a Guest Scholar at Meiji University, Japan during June 2016, ICCR Chair Professor at the National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, spring semester, 2015, and Subir Chowdhury Fellow on Quality and Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science, spring 2014. His M.Phil./Ph.D. on tribal agrarian economies were carried out at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram and awarded by the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi
Dr Sunita Sheel Bandewar
Dr Sunita Bandewar has training in Anthropology and Bioethics. She was awarded an International Fellowship by the International Fogarty Centre, NIH, USA, to pursue a Masters in Health Sciences (Bioethics) at the Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto, Canada, in 2003-04. She was a senior research fellow in bioethics and global health at the University of Toronto on the initiative titled 201 Ethical, Social, Cultural Program in Global Health 201, Canada, for five years. Her engagement with health, as a field of enquiry over these past 30 years, is primarily via empirical research and advocacy in the areas of women and health, gender-based violence, global health, and bioethics, global health, research methodology, program evaluation, and policy analysis. She is the General Secretary, FMES, and serves on the core editorial team of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME), and heads FMES’ newly established programmatic platform namely, Health, Ethics and Law Institute (HEaL Institute) for Training, Research and Advocacy. She serves on the International Ethics Review Board, Médecins Sans Frontières, Geneva. She serves on the editorial board of Health Care Analysis. Her contributions at ResearchGate
Tejal Barai – Jaitly
Member, Ethics and Scientific Advisory Group, Tejal Barai Jaitly is an independent public health consultant. She had played active role in formulation of “Ethical Guidelines in Social Science Research in Health” (NCESSRH –CEHAT, 2000), the first of its kind in India and the subsequent formation of the first ethics committee under Anusandhan Trust. She also contributed towards evolving the “Ethical Guidelines for Counselling Women Facing Domestic Violence” (CEHAT, 2012). Ethics in health care and research continue to be an area of interest; along with other issues such as gender-based violence, universal health care and government funded health insurance schemes. She is the co-editor of two books; “Seen, but not heard: India’s marginalized, neglected and vulnerable children” (Kanika Satyanand and Tejal Barai Jaitly, VHAI, 2003) and “Ethics in Health Research: A Social Science Perspective” (Amar Jesani and Tejal Barai-Jaitly, CSER, 2005).
Dr Uma Kulkarni
Qualification, Designation and Affiliation: M.B., B.S., DOMS, DNB (Oph), PGDip Bioethics and Medical Ethics, PGDip Clinical Ethics, Professor in Ophthalmology and part time faculty at the Centre for Ethics, Yenepoya deemed to be University, Mangalore.
Email: [email protected], [email protected]
Contact number: +91 94481 50032.
Experience:
● Ophthalmologist in Yenepoya Medical College since 2001 which runs undergraduate and post-graduate courses in Ophthalmology and Optometry.
● Faculty at the Centre for Ethics since 2012 (for PG Diploma courses in Bioethics and Medical Ethics, PG Diploma in Clinical Ethics, Master’s in Research Ethics Program, Annual Intensive Research Ethics workshop, Ethics committee training and mentoring, Value added courses in Ethics)
● Member of Ethics Committee since 2015
● Member-Secretary of the Yenepoya Ethics Committee- 1 since 2017
● Member of the Editorial Board, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics
● Coordinator for academic courses, NAAC and student exchange program at Yenepoya deemed to be University
● Authored about 25 publications in national and international journals in the field of Ophthalmology and Ethics and medical education.
Interests:
● Studies on Blindness and its psychosocial impact, research ethics, ethics committee functioning and training
● Conducting quizzes at College and State level in Ophthalmology
● Photography
● Poetry
Achievement:
● Highest marks at the RGUHS exams for DOMS in 1999
● Recipient of the “Best teacher award” in September 2018 at the Yenepoya Deemed to be University.
● Recipient of GFBR Pecha Kucha Award along with Dr. Ravi Vaswani at the Global Forum on Bioethics in Research in November 2018 at South Africa.
● Contributed to getting NABH and FERCAP accreditation for the Ethics Committee.
Dr. Vina Vaswani
Dr. Vina Vaswani is Professor in Forensic Medicine Dept and is Director Centre for Ethics Yenrpoya deemed to be University since 2011. Dr Vina completed her Masters in Bioethics through Erasmus Mundus Program from KU Leuven Belgium, St Radbord University Nijmegen Netherlands and Padova Italy. She completed her PhD from Dublin City University Ireland.
She conceptualized and designed curriculum for Post Graduate Diploma in Bioethics and Medical Ethics in 2011 and is the Program Director for the Yenepoya University Fogarty International Centers Research Ethics Masters Program for India with support from NIH USA (Grant no 1R25TW010305). This is the first Masters program in Research Ethics for whole of India.