Shweta Khandelwal
Program Manager, India Task Force, Lancet COVID-19 Commission, and Head, Nutrition Research at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) (India)
Dr Shweta Khandelwal is the Program Manager, India Task Force, Lancet COVID-19 Commission, and Head, Nutrition Research at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), Delhi and Head, Nutrition Research at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), Delhi. She is a trained and experienced public health nutrition researcher working in the maternal child health and nutrition space in India for the last 16 years. Dr. Khandelwal teaches nutrition epidemiology especially in relation to the rising overweight-obesity, diet related non-communicable diseases and their risk factors among the Indian population.
Dr Khandelwal has had multiple global collaborations and has recently completed a DBT and Wellcome Trust Funded Fellowship looking at the impact of maternal nutrition supplementation on neurodevelopment of their infants. She also has some experience in studying local food environments and examining how they are associated with various forms of malnutrition. She serves on expert panels constituted by FSSAI and MoHFW, GoI including NCDs, oils and fats, sustainable healthy diets and combating high fat, sugar and salt in Indian population. Dr. Khandelwal has great passion for teaching while also pursuing research activities.
Dr. Khandelwal has been instrumental in initiating capacity building initiative in public health nutrition (PHN) and Nutrition Epidemiology. She strongly believes that studying/pursuing nutrition should not be interpreted as mere therapeutic responses to health problems but this field should inculcate more public health understanding, supplemented with better research methods training. At PHFI, she has been the founder member and leader (as faculty in-charge and course coordinator) of the online PHN course enthusiastically from inception for 4 years (2011-2014). The program is quite popular and ranks high among government officials, international participants and UN institutions engaged in nutrition at program and policy levels.
She is a visiting faculty for PHN at the SVT College, Mumbai. She is an invited member, Board of Studies for both SNDT and SGT University. Dr. Khandewal also serves as the Course Director for CCDC’s annual series of a 5-day seminar on nutrition methods for the past decade.
In addition to delivering numerous talks on nutrition policy aspects in India, and contributing to 70 peer reviewed articles in scholarly journals, she has also contributed to more than 150 stories in international and national print and online media. Dr. Khandewal has also won several prestigious fellowships, awards and recognition in the area of PHN including DST’s Young Scientist Award, WHF’s Emerging leader, AIIMS Significant contribution to the Nutrition field, Amity’s Best faculty in PHM etc to name a few.