PHFI

Associate Professor

 Dr Goenka has intensive field experience, with marginalized communities and populations, with different stake holders and a wide range of providers. Her PhD research was an in-depth, ethnography of private general practitioners in Delhi. The ethnographic exploration also delved into their diabetes related practices and also the perspectives of patients with diabetes.

At a tertiary care centre, while clinically treating diabetes patients, she has worked towards their context-specific medical and social empowerment, and development of a culture-specific diabetes curriculum for diabetes-nurse educators, private general practitioners and patients (respectively).
She designed and developed the health promotion component of one of the largest worksite, cardiovascular diseases primary prevention projects, involving 10 large industrial townships, across India (published in JACC). Culture and context specific tobacco prevention, increase in physical activity levels and healthy eating were addressed with significant results both in cross-sectional and cohort analysis.

She has also worked intensively in school based projects, working towards students’ behaviour modification for healthy eating, physical activity and prevention of tobacco and also process evaluation.

Her book ‘Powering India’s Growth’, passionately advocates for national and state polices (especially those outside the health sector) which will foster the health of the Indian citizens. Healthy urban designs, preventing children from being targeted in unhealthy foods-&-beverage advertisements, pictorial food-labelling, fiscal and agricultural polices which make healthy foods cheaper and more easily available than unhealthy foods, are among some of the issues addressed. She also developed the Indian food pyramid- www.foodpyramidindia.org

She is a Fellow of: the 33rd Ten Day Teaching Seminar on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention, World   Heart Federation, 1999; and Diabetes Research and Public Health (2002), CDC, Atlanta, USA) and she has received training in epidemiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
She teaches the courses- Non-communicable disease and public health, introduction to public health, introduction to public health and policy, research methodology, ethical issues in research and qualitative research, with high student ratings.