Understanding the Landscape: Defining the Problem

My research begins with identifying the roots of infectious threats: where they arise, how they spread, and what sustains them. I focus on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and emerging infectious diseases, using the One Health approach to study how human behavior, animal health, and environmental factors intersect.

Through field research across diverse settings around the world, I study how antibiotics are used, and often misused, in both community and clinical contexts. My work combines quantitative and qualitative epidemiology to trace how drug resistance emerges moves through people, livestock, water, and food systems. These investigations have covered a wide range of studies, from rotavirus vaccine trials and typhoid vaccine implementation to cholera surveillance, COVID-19 serosurveys, and research on antibiotic use among smallholder farmers and climate-linked diarrheal diseases.

This stream of my work is about seeing the whole system: tracing the social, microbial, and ecological networks that allow pathogens and resistance genes to thrive.

Creating Change: Developing and Testing Solutions

The second area of reseach interest is designing and evaluating interventions that are both scientifically rigorous and socially meaningful.

I have worked with collaborators across a wide spectrum of universities and academic research centers, state and federal government agencies, community partners, civil society organizations and even self-organizing communitized self-help groups in developing and testing context-specific interventions — from large-scale vaccine trials to hospital-acquired infections, from community education programs to promote responsible antibiotic use to implementation studies – I have contributed to a wide array of research projects.

I have utilized quantitative tools with ethnographic insight to test not only whether an intervention works, but why it works (or not!), and how it can be adapted to real-world conditions.

This is where policy and practice meet science, and where I strive to ensure that interventions are not only effective in trials, but feasible and acceptable in daily life.

From Evidence to Policy: Monitoring, Evaluation, and Scale-Up

The third strand of my work asks: what happens after we implement solutions?

I study the adoption, implementation, and evaluation of interventions to understand how ideas move from pilot projects to public policy. My experience includes contributing to India’s National Action Plan on AMR, designing evaluation frameworks for WHO, and leading implementation analyses in public health programs.

This phase is about ensuring that promising innovations don’t remain isolated successes. Through structured monitoring and participatory evaluation, I identify the levers that enable policies to scale, adapt, and endure.

Creating Change: Developing and Testing Solutions

I see research as a bridge between evidence and empathy. As a founder of STOP AMR, a nonprofit registered in Maryland, I work to transform research insights into community-driven action in India and beyond, supporting small projects that connect scientists, health workers, and citizens in tackling resistance locally.

My broader mission is to help build resilient communities with resilient health systems that can anticipate and respond to infectious threats, guided by the conviction that protecting antibiotics is not just a scientific goal, it’s a moral one, essential for safeguarding the future of human, animal, and planetary health.