Professor Sitara Swarna Rao Aijampur

Sitara SR Ajjampur, MD, PhD, FASc is Professor of Microbiology and Head, The Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory at Christian Medical College, Vellore in India. Her laboratory has been recognised as an Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Collaborating Center of Excellence and hosts one of seven NIH funded Tropical Medicine Research Centers. She provides training in parasitology and tropical medicine, supervises and develops diagnostic parasitology services and has established a national external quality assurance scheme for parasitology.

She leads a multi-disciplinary, translational research group focused on enteric infections and neglected tropical diseases. Her studies have been carried out in geospatially mapped and censused field sites including observational studies, mixed methods, birth cohorts and also included a large hybrid cluster-randomized trial combined with high-throughput laboratory analysis. Her studies have provided insights into socio-demographic, behavioural, geo-spatial, environmental, WASH and One health risks for these infections and assessing the impact of community level interventions.