Rajiv Chowdhury
Focus
Global health inequities. Implementation science. Lifestyle and biological basis of cardiovascular diseases. Environment, climate change, and health.
Biography
Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, an internationally-renowned educator and qualified physician trained in global health epidemiology, is the chair of the Department of Global Health at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work (Stempel College) at Florida International University. Dr. Chowdhury aims to develop a Department of Global Health that opens doors to research and educational opportunities that address health disparities and improve health access for people worldwide.
Before Stempel College, Dr. Chowdhury worked at the University of Cambridge and University of Exeter in England as an Associate Professor and Professor of Global Health, respectively. He currently serves as a country expert in the Global Burden of Disease initiative and a member of the Expert Panel at the World Cancer Research Fund International. In addition, he maintains adjunct roles as a professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland and Executive Director at the South Asian Centre for Non-Communicable Disease Research (CNCR) in Bangladesh.
Dr. Chowdhury’s research interests involve, first, to characterize individual, social, and structural factors of non-communicable diseases (NCD) in low and middle-income settings; and second, how such insights on etiology and inequities could be leveraged to inform context-specific, solutions-driven studies. For example, while at Cambridge, Dr. Chowdhury co-led several large-scale population health projects in South/East Asia, including in Bangladesh, to support these scientific objectives.
Dr. Chowdhury’s scientific publications, thus far, have received >70,000 citations (his current publication H-index is ~70) and informed multiple global guidelines. His work has also received significant media attention, appearing in top-tier outlets like The New York Times, CNN and BBC. Dr. Chowdhury was elected a Fellow of the UK Royal Society of Medicine in 2022, a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology in 2021, a Fellow of the UK Royal Society for Public Health in 2011, and a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology in 2016. In 2013, he received the Bill Gates Senior Prize for contributions to global public health.
Academically, Dr. Chowdhury has received a broad range of academic training and experience in global health epidemiology, global public health and implementation science. He holds doctoral and master degrees in Public Health and Epidemiology, respectively, from the University of Cambridge, where he had the titles of Commonwealth Scholar and Gates Cambridge Scholar. Dr. Chowdhury also received advanced academic training in Global Health at the Harvard and Johns Hopkins Schools of Public Health, in Global Nutritional Epidemiology at the Imperial College London, in Genetic Epidemiology at the Erasmus University Netherlands, and in Intervention Studies at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.