Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor
Founding Director, Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and Health
Co-Director, Center for Point of Care Diagnostics for Nutrition, Infection, and Cancer for Global Health (PORTENT)
Director, Program in International Nutrition
Division of Nutritional Sciences, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University
Saurabh Mehta, M.B.B.S., Sc.D.
Dr. Mehta is a physician with training and expertise in nutrition, epidemiology, infectious disease, and diagnostics. He is currently the Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University and the Founding Director of the Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and Health. He also co-leads the Research Coordinating Center for the NIH’s Nutrition for Precision Health Initiative, the Center for Point of Care Diagnostics for Nutrition, Infection, and Cancer for Global Health (PORTENT), and directs the Program in International Nutrition at Cornell. Dr. Mehta also directs the NIH T32 training program in Artificial Intelligence and Precision Nutrition.
The central theme of his research is the interplay between nutrition and disease, including facilitating field-friendly assessment for both and elucidating how nutrition can be used as a modifiable risk factor to improve health and associated outcomes, often in the context of pregnancy and early childhood. This is achieved through a combination of active surveillance programs, the invention of point-of-care diagnostics, and randomized controlled trials primarily in India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.
Dr. Mehta is the co-inventor of the Cornell NutriPhone and FeverPhone, a NSF- and NIH-funded platform for point-of-care diagnosis of nutritional status and infections. Dr. Mehta also serves as a consultant to the World Health Organization on topics such as tuberculosis, nutrition, and diagnostic test accuracy. In recent years, his team has helped synthesize evidence that has informed guidelines related to nutrition and infection such as infant feeding in the context of SARS-CoV2, Zika virus, and Ebola virus infections and Dr. Mehta has served as the external expert on selected guideline development meetings.
Dr. Mehta received his medical degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India and followed it up with doctoral training in Epidemiology and Nutrition from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including the NIH Technology Accelerator Challenge Prize for innovative global health diagnostics, the Norman Kretchmer Memorial Award in Nutrition and Development, the Rainer Gross Prize for innovations in nutrition and health, and the SUNY Chancellor Award for scholarship and creative activities.