Professor Siuli Mukhopadhyay is a Professor at the Department of Mathematics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay) and an associated faculty member of the Koita Center for Digital Health at IIT Bombay. Her research interests include various topics in theoretical and applied statistics, including the design of experiments, statistical modeling, generalized linear models, and count time series. She also works in disease modeling and health informatics. She has recently been awarded funding support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to lead the Diseases and Interventions Modelling to Action Group (DIMAG), a pan-India disease modeling consortium at IIT Bombay. We spoke to her about her research interests and plans for DIMAG. Excerpts from the conversation.
I am a statistician and have worked on various problems in theoretical statistics, applied statistics, and biostatistics. More recently, I have been working mainly on applied statistics problems.
As an example of our research, we recently worked on an optimal design problem in the context of a river monitoring network. This problem can be viewed as an optimal design for a spatial setup. It involved developing a river monitoring network to test the water quality of rivers. If one would like to monitor water quality from a river, this raises questions about where the monitoring stations should be set up. This in turn could be translated into a statistical problem, as the task has a complex data structure, with the data being of spatial nature. We developed exact optimal designs for this problem, which helped us understand where the monitoring stations should be set up along the river length in order to best estimate the water quality.
During the course of my career, I have also worked extensively in the field of Biostatistics and medical statistics. My early work in Biostatistics began during my time as a tenure track Assistant Professor at Medical College in Georgia, Augusta, USA. I was working with clinicians and they used to approach me with problems from their healthcare settings. The challenges were brought to my attention by the doctors and these required statistics as a tool for insights. Even after returning to India, I continued being in touch with doctors at KEM Hospital and other hospitals in both Mumbai and Kolkata.
During the course of my career, I have also worked extensively in the field of Biostatistics and medical statistics. My early work in Biostatistics began during my time as a tenure track Assistant Professor at Medical College in Georgia, Augusta, USA. I was working with clinicians and they used to approach me with problems from their healthcare settings. The challenges were brought to my attention by the doctors and these required statistics as a tool for insights. Even after returning to India, I continued being in touch with doctors at KEM Hospital and other hospitals in both Mumbai and Kolkata.
In 2015, I became interested in disease modeling. I received funding support from IRCC and WRCB at IITB, respectively, for this work and was able to start modeling dengue and malaria in Mumbai. We did time series modeling of disease counts and made statistical models. Currently, much of my research is focused on this disease model. I have several peer-reviewed publications, have given multiple invited talks at various conferences and institutes (including the Institute of Disease Modeling) on the topic of disease modeling, and supervised one post-doctoral student and a Ph.D. thesis on this topic.
We also carried out some research by modeling the incidence of COVID cases and worked with municipalities in Pune and Mumbai for this project. The Pune Municipal Corporation was keen to have good tools for tracking the rise of COVID cases in Pune City and gave us access to some data on the cases. Hence, at that time, we were able to provide real-time prediction results for the question through our epidemiological model.
More recently, I have been a part of the Koita Centre for Digital Health which was established at IIT in 2021. The Centre provided a good platform for a group of us with an interest in disease modeling to interact with each other. We were also approached by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), as they were interested in establishing a pan-India disease modeling consortium. Specifically, the Foundation was seeking an anchor for a consortium focused on both disease modeling and interventions. IITB agreed to be the anchor for this consortium. The expectation was that while IITB would be the anchor, other partner modeler institutions from all across India could join through this mechanism, to address programmatic questions and policy questions relating to disease modeling and interventions in diverse ways.
As the anchor organization of DIMAG, we first wrote a letter of interest outlining our vision for the project. This pre-proposal was reviewed favorably at the BMGF and we were then invited to submit a full application. The experience of writing the two proposals was very different from that of writing standard research funding proposals. Our grant was for setting up the initiative, along with all the requisite administrative structures such as advisory committees. The initiative would be expected to enable academic research and interventions across a wide range of problems and with the expertise of the consortium partners. Furthermore, the BMGF played an active role in co-developing the proposal with our team.
It is envisioned that, once functional, the consortium would become the “go-to” place for disease modeling, particularly infectious diseases. Hence, if there were to be an outbreak of a new disease or indeed a previously known disease such as measles, the consortium would be uniquely placed to support knowledge creation and interventions, and solutions. The proposal currently lists nearly 15 infectious diseases, including Tuberculosis, vaccine-preventable diseases, Malaria, and neglected tropical diseases. The DIMAG consortium would enable us to have a significant impact in India.
Professor Mukhopadhyay received WRCB’s Intramural funding support in 2016 to research ‘Modelling Malaria and Dengue Prevalence in Mumbai’
