Professor Rajiv Chowdhury 

Internationally-renowned Global Health expert joins Exeter

A Professor of Global Health who has a wide range of expertise in investigating health inequalities in disease risk and prevention in countries across the world has joined the University of Exeter.

Professor Rajiv Chowdhury has recently moved from the University of Cambridge. His research interests broadly involve lifestyle, biological and environmental epidemiology of non-communicable diseases, and inequalities in health across low and middle-income countries.

Rajiv said: “I’m delighted to be moving to Exeter, and I’m really excited by the level of scientific excellence at Exeter, and the dynamic vision I see across a range of public health research areas. I’m looking forward to developing collaborations that will have real benefits to people and communities across the world.”

Rajiv has a particular emphasis on understudied non-Western population groups. At Cambridge, he co-founded and co-led several major global health cohort studies in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and generated high quality, high impact research outputs. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed publications.

He also served as the Scientific Director of the CAPABLE Global Health program in Cambridge, which was underpinned by a £8.4M global health grant from the UK Research and Innovations. The project aimed to help develop simple, scalable and effective solutions to control major environmental and lifestyle risk factors in Bangladesh.

Additionally, Professor Chowdhury serves as a Country Expert for the Global Burden of Disease study, led by the World Health Organisation and the Institute for Health metrics and Evaluation. The study is the most comprehensive effort to date to measure epidemiological levels and trends worldwide.

Professionally, Rajiv is a physician who also obtained an MPhil in Epidemiology (as a Commonwealth scholar) and a PhD in Public Health (as a Gates scholar) from the University of Cambridge.

He received further advanced training in Global Health from Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Oxford universities, and in Epidemiology from Imperial College and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was elected a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology, UK Royal Society for Public Health, and more recently of the American College of Epidemiology. In 2013, Rajiv received the Bill Gates Senior Award in Cambridge for contributions to global health.

Professor Claire Hulme, Director of the University of Exeter’s Institute for Health Research, said: “I’m delighted to welcome Rajiv, whose research has meaningful benefit for health outcomes for communities across the world. His expertise has a natural synergy with a wide range of our academics, and I’m excited to see the collaborations that will no doubt result on even greater impact and improving lives.”

Date: 5 August 2021