Brief Profile:

Dr Kasturi Sen is a social and political scientist by training and specialises in the political economy of health, sociology and development economics. She has more than 20 years’ experience of teaching and policy research in international health and development. She is currently based at Wolfson College University of Oxford as an independent scholar and as a founding member of the South Asia Research Cluster (SARC).

Her research and evaluation experience in Europe, south Asia and the Middle East has been focused on understanding the role and value of public health (systems) from a comparative and multidimensional perspective. This includes strategies for strengthening public health systems in India under the changing dynamics of health care financing with implications for access and equity by gender, race and class. In the Middle East she has ongoing work on the nature of health systems in the region as well as the mental and physical health effects of conflict and of sanctions on population health.

She has collaborated through EU- Framework programme grants with major public sector institutions in India, the Middle East, the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam, Brazil and South Africa since 1997. In India she has long standing collaborations with JNU, with CESS (Hyderabad) ISI (Kolkata) and Chennai Medical College (CMC). With these collaborations, she established the ‘South Asia Network for Evidence based medicine’ at JNU (1998) and the first ever Network on Ageing in India (1994), focused on collection of data on demographic, epidemiological transition and evaluating their social implications as evidence base for policy. She has mostly been based at academic institutions in the UK (Cambridge, Oxford and London) where she taught and mentored postgraduate students across disciplines (economics, anthropology, epidemiology, environmental science and public health) and also advised WHO – Europe and Geneva and the European Commission.

She also has long standing interest in research ethics and an ongoing interest on the ethics of research and data collection during conflict. More recently, for the past 2.5 years she has been part of the Oxford Policy Management Group’s Patna team and helped to redesign the BTSP study incorporating health systems software or its ‘relational dynamics’ as part of the public health systems strengthening programme of the GOB.