Dr. Prakash C. Gupta is the Director of Healis-Sekhsaria Institute of Public Health since its foundation on August 1, 2004. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, USA and a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University, USA. He was a Senior Research Scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (joined October 1966), and Honorary Consultant at the Tata Memorial Centre, Mumbai until July 31, 2004. He was President of the 14th World Conference on Tobacco and Health that was held in Mumbai, India during March 8-12, 2009 (pictured) and of four national conferences on tobacco or health. He has a Doctor of Science degree in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University, U.S.A. (1975), and a Master of Science in Statistics from the Bombay University (1965). He was a Takemi Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, U.S.A. (1984-85) (pictured), a Visiting Scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France (1993-94) and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Medical Research Council, South Africa during July-August 1998.
Dr. Gupta has authored or co-authored over 400 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, 34 in peer-reviewed proceedings and books, edited or co-edited 20 scientific reports, proceedings and a special issue of journals, contributed 27 chapters in 23 books and has contributed to 123 group publications in addition to authoring about 70 commentaries, editorials, letter to editor, e-articles etc. A list of his publications is available on Google Scholar. Three of his major edited reports were published and released by the MoHFW, GoI and one co-edited report by the National Cancer Institute, USA.
In an editorial capacity, Dr. Gupta has been connected with numerous journals in the past as well as currently, including as the Regional Editor for South-East Asia for the journal, Tobacco Control. He has peer-reviewed research papers from over 20 research journals.
Dr. Gupta is consulted by many organizations including the World Health Organization, CDC Foundation, International Agency for Research on Cancer, and others. He is a member of the WHO Study Group on Tobacco Product Regulation (TobReg), Global Tobacco Surveillance System (GTSS), National Cancer Registry Programme of the Indian Council of Medical Research and many more national and international expert groups.
Dr. Gupta has received several prestigious awards. Some important ones are: the Luther Terry Award from the American Cancer Society for Exemplary Leadership in Tobacco Control in the category of Outstanding Research Contribution; Tobacco Free World Award from the Director General, World Health Organisation, Geneva; Lifetime Achievements Award by the Foundation of Head and Neck Oncology; Sushruta Award of the Indian Dental Association and oration award from several institutions. His name is included in the Stanford list of top 2% scientists in the world. As per Research.com, he is ranked 6th among medical scientists in India.
What was your experience during the fellowship?
Very good and exciting. Got my first personal computer in 1984 on my office desk and learned how to use it, especially for word processing – Wordstar, I think. The atmosphere of academic freedom without a highly structured program was exhilarating. I attended a series of seminars on Generalized Linear Models – an advanced biostatistical topic for that time that I used for the analysis of the dataset I had taken from India and published my Takemi paper using it. This was helped by an instrument that was loaned to me by my faculty advisor, Cyrus Mehta. It had a keypad and a built-in printer and could be connected to the School computer through my home telephone so I could run my programs and analyse my dataset even during the night from home. I very much enjoyed the depth and breadth of various seminars and academic activities in the school. I even got invited to a series of monthly dinner seminars at the Kennedy School of Government on tobacco taxation and tobacco control policies. One of the most enjoyable activities was lunch sessions with other Takemi Fellows often joined by Michael Reich in a side room available to us. We were all ‘brown baggers’ and in those 40-45′ we enjoyed talking about a lot of things.
What was the most valuable takeaway for you?
Quite a few. In one seminar, someone described the use of a laptop (heavy and bulky those days) for a face-to-face survey, I think, in Saudi Arabia. It fired my imagination and after returning in 1985, I started exploring possibilities for similar use in my fieldwork. With the advances in technology, in a few years, I located a hand-held calculator-like device that was programmable and had detachable memory drives. I imported and used them for my field surveys even though they had only a three-line, 16-character display. During the 1990s, in a cohort study for investigating tobacco-attributable mortality, I got about 160000 adults surveyed house-to-house and followed up with those devices. I published scores of papers using that dataset and it is being shared and used in many other places like the Asia Cohorts Consortium, the Global Burden of Disease study and others. Another foray while at Harvard was into advocacy for public health. For the first time in the USA, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health proposed placing mandatory health warnings on smokeless tobacco packages. By then, I had published many research papers based on our large epidemiological studies in India on the relationship between smokeless tobacco use and oral cancer and precancer. Friends at the school encouraged me to go and depose. After my deposition, a prominent local dentist deposed saying, almost thundering, that how can anyone doubt the relationship between smokeless tobacco use and oral precancers when large field studies have already been published from India. That was quite satisfying. That event was also attended by a lawyer fighting the first case with the smokeless tobacco industry on behalf of a 16-year-old oral cancer patient who was a smokeless tobacco user. This lawyer met me later and requested me to depose for the case. It was done in a moot court in the presence of tobacco industry lawyers. A big learning from that activity for me that I repeat often is, other than myself, the only people who have read and analysed every word that I have written, are tobacco industry lawyers. The advocacy activities continued after my return, especially with my active involvement in the world conferences on smoking or health, which I helped in renaming as the World Conference on Tobacco or Health. I was a co-chair for South Asia in the UICC Program on Cancer and Tobacco. With help from the American Cancer Society, I organized advocacy training workshops for participants in India from Mike Partschuk, Founder and Director of the Advocacy Institute in Washington DC. I coordinated the Voice of Tobacco Victims campaign which was instrumental in advancing tobacco control in India.
What would you advise others who are interested?
Consider the depth of the main topic of your interest that you will receive at Harvard and the breadth of a large spectrum of public health topics that you will be exposed to. Don’t feel hesitant or shy – go and speak with faculty and other people you want to. They are busy but very nice and will give you the time and guidance. There are plenty of facilities and possibilities at Harvard – you only need to decide and choose what you want to do.
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