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 the Founding Director of the Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and Health in the College of Human Ecology and the Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University . He is also the co-director of the NIH-funded Center for Point of Care Diagnostics for Nutrition, Infection, and Cancer (PORTENT) as part of the POCTRN+ network. Dr. Mehta is the program director of the NIH-supported training program on artificial intelligence and precision nutrition. He also co-leads the Research Coordinating Center for the NIH’s Nutrition for Precision Health Initiative, and directs the Program in International Nutrition at Cornell.
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 received his medical degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India and followed it up with doctoral degree in Epidemiology and Nutrition from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including a NIH technology accelerator challenge prize for innovative global health diagnostics, the Norman Kretchmer memorial award for nutrition and development, the Rainer Gross Prize for innovations in nutrition and health, and the SUNY Chancellor award for scholarship and creative activities.