New York: An eminent Indian-origin researcher and academician has been appointed as dean of the public health school at the prestigious Rutgers University in the US state of New Jersey. Jasjit Ahluwalia will assume his new role as dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health from April 2015, the school's Chancellor Brian Strom said. An alumnus of New York University and Harvard, Ahluwalia is a nationally recognised researcher in the field of health disparities and minority health, and nicotine addiction, Strom said. He is also engaged in global health work with two active research projects in Mumbai and New Delhi.
Strom expressed confident that Ahluwalia's "exceptional experience, expertise, and energy will build on the existing strengths of the School of Public Health, develop new areas of study and exploration, and foster the growth of junior-level researchers." Ahluwalia is currently professor of internal medicine and epidemiology at the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center, where he was recruited in 2005 to become the founding executive director of the Office of Clinical Research. Ahluwalia joins a long list of Indian-origin academicians assuming leaderships roles at renowned US and global universities. In 2010, Nitin Nohria became the first Indian-origin head of Harvard Business School.
In the same year, University of Chicago's Booth School of Business named Stanford University professor Sunil Kumar as its Dean. Noted Indian-American academician Dipak Jain took over as Dean of INSEAD in March 2011. Before this, Jain was Dean at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management from 2001-2009. IIT-Delhi alumnus Soumitra Dutta was named Dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in 2012. Last year, noted Indian-American academician Rakesh Khurana was appointed Dean of the prestigious Harvard College, the school within Harvard University that grants undergraduate degrees. Ahluwalia recently completed his term as chair of the National Advisory Council for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), having been appointed to the council by former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
