Niranjan Saggurti

Niranjan Saggurti is director of the Population Council’s office in India. Saggurti provides strategic direction and technical oversight to the Council’s research initiatives on young people’s health and development; sexual and reproductive health; and HIV prevention, care, and treatment in India.

A public health researcher with more than twenty years’ experience, Saggurti has conducted diagnostic, experimental, and evaluation studies aimed at preventing HIV infection among high-risk and vulnerable populations, reducing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), and expanding maternal and child health for India’s most marginalized women. At the Council, Saggurti led seminal work to better understand the relationship between migration and HIV in India. Based on his research, Indian policymakers have redesigned the national strategy for reducing HIV infection among migrants in India. He also made significant contributions to the prevention of spousal transmission of HIV, working with women who experience intimate-partner violence to help them reduce their risk of HIV. Results from this project have contributed to international policy debates on this issue in Asia and the Pacific.

Before joining the Council in 2006 Saggurti was an assistant professor at the International Institute for Population Sciences. In addition to serving as a scientific reviewer for several international journals, Saggurti is on the editorial board of the BioMed Research International Journal. In 1998 he received a PhD Training Fellowship from the University Grants Commission in India and in 2010 was awarded the Prof. K.B. Pathak Memorial Award for his paper on migration and HIV in India entitled, “Migration, mobility and sexual risk behavior in Mumbai, India: Mobile men with non-residential wife show increased risk.”

Saggurti has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and has been on the editorial boards of international journals, including PLoS One, and on technical advisory committees in the field of HIV and family planning.

Saggurti holds an MS in statistics from Acharya Nagarjuna University, a master’s in population studies (MPS), and a PhD in population studies from the International Institute for Population Sciences.