Dr. Gowri Iyer

I have a background and training in clinical psychology (post-graduate) and cognitive and behavioural sciences research training with a special focus on disordered populations (doctoral training).My doctoral research work included being trained to explore and improve understanding of language and cognition from a multi-disciplinary approach, i.e., behavioural sciences, linguistics, neural networks, animal studies, neuroanatomical and clinical research, etc, combining both theoretical approaches along with applied and clinical research. This approach and training, has fuelled and shaped my understanding of the field.

Since the completion of my doctoral research, I have worked in several capacities, including academic and research positions across various institutes and organizations. My earliest work experience included working as a Lecturer early in my career at a Speech and Hearing Institute in Bangalore. In addition, I have also worked briefly in education research, pedagogy, curriculum development and student assessment. I have also worked briefly as a consultant at an NGO working in maternal and child health, in monitoring and evaluation. My most recent work experience included being the research coordinator for a multi-centre ICMR National Task Force project to develop and validate a pan India comprehensive and multilingual screening battery for dementia. (http://brandp.in/icmr/index.html ). I am continuing to work in this area and future studies include working on illiterate cognition and developing and validating tools to effectively tap into it, understanding gender disadvantage in dementia, improving the overall health system efficacy in screening and diagnosing common neurological conditions, and also move towards developing more
community based multi-factorial interventions and rehabilitation measures to delay the onset of dementia and slow cognitive decline.

Since my joining the Indian Institute of Public Health, Hyderabad as Assistant Professor and I have been involved in several projects that include working in projects focussed on prevention and screening of diabetic retinopathy, retinopathy of prematurity, developing research platforms to capture multimorbidity in an intergenerational rural cohort, strengthening multi-sectoral approaches in primary health care settings, vaccine hesitancy etc. In addition, my role at the Institute also involves teaching of several courses. My research interests include areas of cognitive science, understanding health behaviours, factors impacting behaviour change, public mental health, using a social determinants approach to understand health outcomes, gender and vulnerable populations and health outcomes, policy development and analyses, ageing research with special focus on dementia and efforts at dementia prevention and rehabilitation, and cognition across the lifespan and the factors that impact it.