Maternal and perinatal Health Research collaboration, India MaatHRI 

Developing a peer-support intervention trial to improve post-discharge care and outcomes of preterm babies in rural Uganda (PREPare: PREterm Post-discharge Peer-support care)

Manisha is a senior research fellow at Oxford Population Health. She is a clinician by training and specialised in clinical epidemiology and global population health research. She is an honorary professor of epidemiology and population health research at Srimanta Sankaradeva University of Health Sciences (a state university of Government of Assam), India. She was a Medical Research Council (MRC) career development fellow and recipient of an MRC Transition Support award.

Manisha established and leads a research and training platform for maternal and perinatal health research in India called MaatHRI and is using this platform to conduct large epidemiological studies to improve pregnancy care and outcomes. Through MaatHRI she has created a large data resource that includes clinical, biochemical and imaging data from pregnant and postpartum women in India.

Her work focuses on improving the health of mothers and babies globally through innovative and translational research, with key areas including anaemia and iron deficiency in pregnancy, cardiovascular diseases in pregnancy and fetal heart development. She developed the FoCUS Solutions training resource, a freely available self-learning tool to enable non-cardiologists to acquire skills in imaging the heart using point-of-care cardiac ultrasound.

She worked as an epidemiologist for the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Death in the UK and the UK Obstetric Surveillance System. Her previous work developed the English Maternal Morbidity Outcome indicator, analysed the characteristics of pregnant women who died and identified risk factors for progression from severe morbidity to death among pregnant women in the UK.

Manisha was a Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Trust scholar at the University of Oxford during her DPhil. She was a scholar under the Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholars (FICRS) programme, National Institutes of Health, USA, and led a team to design a multicentre surveillance study on cardio-metabolic diseases in South Asia.

Manisha previously worked as a consultant for the National Polio Surveillance Project of the World Health Organization as a surveillance medical officer and state routine immunisation officer in India. She has a MBBS degree from India, an MSc in Global Health Science and a DPhil in Public Health from the University of Oxford, UK. 

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