London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Dr Abhijit Nadkarni from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) has been awarded a prestigious Global Research Professorship from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

Dr Nadkarni, who is an associate professor of Global Mental Health and addictions psychiatrist, will receive £1.8 million to help reduce the impact of alcohol-related harms in India.

He is one of four leading health researchers to receive an award from NIHR over the next five years to help tackle key issues ranging from healthy ageing to improving newborn care.

Dr Nadkarni said: “I am very excited about this award as it will allow me to expand my research on developing and testing affordable, accessible and scalable interventions for drinking problems in India and other low resource settings. Alcohol use disorders are a significant and growing problem in developing countries but, unfortunately, interventions for these disorders remain woefully under-funded and under-researched.”

In his project, entitled ‘Advancing research to reduce alcohol related harms - lessons for policy, practice and sustainable development in India’, Dr Nadkarni will develop and test an intervention to tackle problem drinking. The intervention will be scalable so that it can cater for differences in severity of problem drinking but also strive to work with families to increase overall engagement with treatment. Dr Nadkarni will also examine various strategies needed to prepare health systems to efficiently and sustainably integrate the intervention into routine care.

The NIHR Global Research Professorships recognise academic leaders with a track-record of applied health research in LMICs, with eight professorships having been awarded since 2018.

All awardees will have access to funding for early-career research and support posts.

NIHR Academy Dean, Professor Waljit Dhillo said: “I’m delighted to warmly welcome our latest cohort of NIHR Global Research Professors.

“These leading researchers will improve the health and care of people around the world. They will develop early career researchers in their teams worldwide, building research capacity”

Read more about the announcement on the NIHR website.