Kalpana Balakrishnan is a senior global environmental health researcher with nearly 30 years of experience in leading large scale field epidemiological studies in India. Her primary research involvement has been in the area of health effects of household and ambient air pollution and chemical risk assessment. She has designed and conducted multiple cohort studies and has also been involved with multi-country randomized control trials, to strengthen the evidence for efficacy of air pollution interventions on birth/early childhood and adult cardio-vascular outcomes. She is globally acclaimed for her contributions on developing novel exposure assessment approaches to characterize the complex multi-media exposures experienced by rural and urban populations in low and middle income countries

She is currently engaged in research and training collaborations with a network of more than 50 national and international institutional partners to address national and global health research priorities. She is a distinguished fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences in India