Prof. Shankar Das, MA, MSc, MPhil, PhD is the Director of IIHMR in New Delhi. He was Professor and founding Chair of the Centre for Health Policy Planning and Management (CHPPM) at the School of Health Systems Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. Between 2007 and 2014 as the first Chair he provided academic leadership to the centre and nurtured it to become a centre of excellence. He has over two decades of experience as a teacher, trainer, researcher and human resources development practitioner in the field of public health and health management.
His professional skills mainly include public health, primary health care, applied research, health promotion and professional education; he has extensive experience of collaborating and working at the highest level in government, the public sector and academic research institutions at regional, national and international levels. He enjoys and thrives in challenging social, political and physical environments and has extensive experience of leading and managing multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary teams.
Prof Das has published widely in reputed peer reviewed journals and books on diverse areas such as public health, mental health, sustainable development, wellbeing and prosperity. The focus of his work within literature is focussed on evidence-informed policy and practice across the spectrum of public health issues and strategies. He is also on the editorial board of several internationally recognised scientific publications. He participates in national and international scientific advisory committees and technical resource groups in many key national and international organisations of both low and middle income countries.
Prof Das was invited by the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health, Union of Myanmar as a consultant to advice on national capacity building and provide technical expertise to improve behavioural components of health care delivery in Myanmar. As part of human resource development initiatives in Bangladesh, he was invited to design and deliver a series of high quality capacity building programmes for multi-disciplinary health care professionals in health care management in the country. Furthermore, in 2009, he was awarded the prestigious globally recognised TISS-LSE Faculty Fellowship to pursue a post-graduate degree at the world-renowned London School of Economics and Political Sciences in London (LSE). This led to him developing, a now well recognised, Masters in Public Health in Health Policy, Economics and Finance at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.
He was also employed as a research associate at the Personal Social Services Research Unit based at the London School of Economics where he studied ethnic minority patients' access to mental health services in the UK. Subsequently, he spent a year as visiting fellow to the same institution and worked on the difference in mental health and long term care policies between the UK and India.
He was invited to be visiting Professor to the College of Medicine at the University of Vermont in USA to lead a summer course on integrated and holistic health practice for post-graduate students. In 2014, he was awarded the prestigious Fogarty post-doctoral research fellowship to gain advanced skills in chronic non-communicable disorders and diseases across the life span at the Department of Public Health at the University of Florida in USA. This was supported by the world renowned National Institute of Health. In 2018, he was recipient of a national fellowship for global health studies of the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research and was nominated to be visiting scholar at the School of Public Health and Information Sciences at the University of Louisville in America.
More recently, he has successfully led major funded projects for the World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health, Ford Foundation, Asian Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, LSE-UK, European Commission, Ministry of Health in India, Indian Council of Medical Research and Population Foundation of India. He had also initiated and developed academic collaborations with several universities of repute in Europe and the Americas wherein he has designed and delivered numerous high quality programmes including the Study India Programme (SIP) in Social Care Policy. He is internationally recognised in developing curriculum for several post-graduate and doctoral programmes in public health and health services management.
