Vadu Rural Health Program

Neeraj Kashyap works as senior I.T manager at Vadu rural health program. He is chief programmer and database administrator and works on heterogeneous metadata. He supports various research projects at Vadu, but his primary task involves entire Vadu HDSS data management. Neeraj plays key role in INDEPTH data sharing project, namely iSHARE. He also trained INDEPTH Secretariat staff on DDI 2.1 a metadata standard and supports the INDEPTH on data documentation intiatives. He also supported Wosera HDSS (PNG) in development of their data management software and trained their IT staffs on PHP and MySQL.

Neeraj has completed his MS in Advance Software Technologies from International Institute of Information Technology, Pune, India in 2008. He has also completed Higher National Diploma in Computing and multimedia (HND), Edexcel International, London, UK. He is also a member of Technical Implementation Committee (TIC) of DDI Alliance where he creates, maintains, and enhances the Data Documentation Initiative specification. Presently, he is enhancing our institute's data collection capabilities by converting the paper collection to electronic capturing of data.

Somnath S. Sambhudas is an INDEPTH fellow (Information Technology) since 2008. However he was instrumental in developing Vadu data management system and even now remains as the Principal I.T. manager for the Vadu HDSS.

Somnath has 10 years of progressive experience in health and demographic surveillance field activities and data management. He has conceptualized the project called "INDEPTHStats" for INDEPTH Network and its member centres in 2009 to display the basic demographic results on the web in the form of graphs and tables. INDEPTHStats will launch very soon by INDEPTH network.

Somnath is presently pursuing his Masters in Computer Science from Indira Ghandhi National Open University in India and has completed his Bachelor of Arts in economics (2008) from university of Pune (India).

'Multi-tasking at field level' is a key phrase to describe the profile of Bharat Choudhari. Over last 9 years, he has been involved in various research projects at Vadu. He is responsible for managing all fieldwork and logistics related to it. It includes providing all stationary, training and monitoring of surveillance activities and extensive planning of fieldwork. He is not only responsible for HDSS but also accountable for variety of research projects including social science research, intervention studies, clinical vaccine trials, non-communicable disease study and interdisciplinary studies like Ayurgenomics. In addition to his field management skills he has acquired and developed his knowledge data cleaning and analysis using SPSS & STATA. Bharat Choudhari is an absolute example of capacity building within the rural community. He is the first field researcher from Vadu who has expanded his horizon from field work to data analysis and had opportunity to attend the INDEPTH ALPHA InterVA analysis workshop in Kisumu, Kenya. He has completed his Masters degree in Politics and Marathi and is currently pursuing his diploma in Population studies from International Institute of Population sciences, Mumbai.

Dr Diana Kekan is working on Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health's Typhoid Vaccine trial as the Study Medical Coordinator. She has been working in Vadu Rural Health Program for almost a year. Other than the clinical trial, she is involved in the Verbal Autopsy project, wherein her primary responsibility is assessing the causes of death and allotting ICD10 code for the same. She attended the INDEPTH ALPHA InterVA analysis workshop organized by INDEPTH Network. She is providing a retrospective insight on the prevalence of diseases in Vadu by analyzing the VA data. She was recently selected as a national research assistant for the INTREC (INDEPTH Training and Research Centres of Excellence) project.

Dr Diana's venture into health began, when she pursued her undergraduation in Bachelors of Medicine and Bachelors of Surgery from M.I.M.E.R Medical College, Pune. She worked as a research assistant at Chest Research Foundation, Pune on an epidemiological study on Asthma control test. This study prompted her to pursue her Masters in Public Health (Major-Health Promotion) from Northern Illinois University, USA. She worked as an Intern in City of Evanston Health and Human Services. She actively participated in projects focused on physical activity namely "Youth out Walking program, Kids Walk to School" programs.

Other than working independently, Dr Diana' s few strengths include strong writing skills, diligence, sincerity and precision in work with strong sense of work ethics. Her experience in clinics and in research in terms of epidemiology, literature review, assistance in proposal writing, SOPs is conducive for research. Her education in medicine and public health forms a fine balance for research activities in Vadu.