Lakshman Balaji joined the Cornell MPH Program after working as a dentist in the only government funded hospital in his home state, in India. As an MPH student specializing in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Lakshman refined skills in biostatistics and data analytics through his courses and internships with the Smithsonian Institutes, and with the U.S. National Park Service.
Now, Lakshman works as a biostatistician with the Center for Resuscitation Science at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a nonprofit research center. Lakshman’s team aim to understand more about the efficacies of different clinical approaches to critical care, such as septic shock and cardiac arrest. Much of his work involves using statistical software (R) to analyze data from patients when small changes are made to clinical trial regimens. For example, these trials and analyses might help to test a physician’s hypothesis about improved outcomes from adding vitamin C to a regimen for cardiac arrest. These types of clinical research innovations “help to set clinical guidelines for a population as a whole,” says Lakshman.
He is also embarking on a side project with a health research fellow at Harvard, analyzing secondary data to test whether temperatures affect the number of calls to emergency rooms. Lakshman says he would not have been interested in this topic were it not for Cornell’s MPH Program faculty discussing climate change and the social determinants of health, and how different populations will be affected differently by an increasing rise of global temperatures. He wants to use data to help understand how we can better station resources in public health care for those who are—and will—be disproportionately affected by climate change.
The Center is submitting new proposals to better understand the epidemiology of COVID. For now, while many clinical research trials are on pause, Lakshman’s team is working from home—and he still has plenty of data from past trials to analyze.