RESEARCH @SRIHER
Research at SRIHER is driven by the institutional and national vison to contribute to the prevention and alleviation of disease and disability, leading to the betterment of the health of our population. A network of sophisticated research laboratories provides world class facilities to faculty and students for engagement in clinical, biomedical, public health, pharmaceutical, health sciences, medical technology and healthcare management related research. There is special emphasis on multi-disciplinary and collaborative research where faculty members drawn from different departments and divisions routinely take up high impact research to inform national and international health priorities.
Several centers of excellence created through extra-mural support from Government of India including the ICMR Center for Advanced Research on Air Quality, Climate and Health and The DBT- Wellcome India Alliance funded Centers focused on Early Childhood Caries (CECCre) and Speech & Hearing Disorders in Children (SRESHT) and from International Organisations including the World Health Organisation Collaborating Center for Research and Training in Occupational and Environmental Health and the National Institute of Health Research (UK) Center for Environment and Non-Communicable Diseases are anchoring multiple field, hospital laboratory and hospital based research teams to examine priority health concerns in longitudinal cohorts.
An important element of research progress on campus has been the creation of thematic clusters that involve faculty members across departments and faculties to create inter-disciplinary teams to pursue collaborative research and generate high volume grants from national and international agencies. Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Public Health, Environment, Climate Change, Genetics and Genomics, Epidemiology of Communicable and Non-Communicable Diseases, Drug discovery and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Digital Health and Data Sciences in Healthcare, Health Care Technologies, Translational Clinical Research, Health Care Economics and Healthcare management, Sports and Exercise Sciences, Allied Health and Rehabilitative Sciences and Medical and Health Science Education represent a few such clusters that are leveraging institutional multi-disciplinary strengths with eminent national and international teams to address national health research priorities.
With a network of more than 60 institutional collaborators, that include numerous US, European, and Indian universities, Governmental and non-governmental research institutions, the faculty at SRIHER have been involved in numerous national and global research and training efforts. Funders include major national agencies such as Department of Science and Technology, Department of Bio-Technology, Indian Council of Medical Research, AYUSH, Defense Research Development Organization and Ministry of Environment and International funding agencies such as The National Institutes of Health (USA), The Wellcome Trust and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. SRIHER also has an excellent set of intra-mural funding support schemes to help undergraduate and PhD students as well as junior faculty seed their research explorations and build capacities for attracting extra-mural funds. In order to nurture research aptitude and skills among the students and early career researchers, the honourable Chancellor of SRIHER has instituted fellowships for undergraduates and doctoral students as well as early career faculty to create momentum and accelerate growth for junior researchers.
In 2023, SRIHER achieved an important milestone of crossing 10,000 publications, receiving over 1 lakh citations and an H-Index of 98. A total of 1090 publications were made in 2023 with nearly 11% of them in Q1 journals and women represented in more than 80 percent of the publications. Some of the highest impact factor journals that featured publications by SRIHER faculty include the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of American Medical Association, the European Heart Journal, Lancet Planetary Health, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, JAMA Pediatrics, Redox Biology, Environmental Health Perspectives, PLOS-One, JACC-Cardiovascular Interventions, Arthritis &Rheumatology, Movement Disorders, Cell Reports and the Lancet Rheumatology (with impact factors ranging from 8 to 156). In 2023, 24 new patents were filed, 8 patents were published and 5 patents were awarded. In addition 3 new copyrights were filed and 7 copyrights were awarded. 2 new patents were filed, 4 patents were published and 5 patents were awarded.
An important milestone in research and innovation at SRIHER has been the operationalization of the SRIHER Innovation and Incubation Center (SRIIC) with funding support from the BIRAC- DBT, Govt. of India that now is incubating 24 start-up companies in the health care technology space. More than 20 faculty and SRIHER students are also currently enrolled as pre-incubatees and receiving advanced training to set up companies based on their initial ideations. SRIIC infra-structure has been significantly upgraded to provide high-end laboratory and administrative spaces to afford significant expansion and accommodate a wide-variety of start-ups. SRIIC has supported the current incubates in securing over 5.7 crores in grants from Government of India to support their product ideas. The close collaborations between the Bio-Nest Incubator at SRIHER and network of bio-incubators in Tamil Nadu anchored by the Health Care Technology Incubation Center at IIT-Chennai is expected to provide high quality inputs to the National Bio-Pharmaceutical Mission of the Government of India.
The Office of Dean (Research) headed by Professor. Kalpana Balakrishnan, Dean (Research) and supported by a team of Associate Deans provides centralized administrative support for all aspects of research management including research planning, grant administration (including human resource, financial and equipment management) and registrations/ approvals from relevant national and international certifying bodies. The office also is responsible for formulating and implementing multiple research policies associated with conduct and execution of grants, publication of manuscripts, IPR, research recognitions and multiple other aspects of registrations and approvals. A string of advanced sophisticated laboratories that includes instrumentation for bio-analytical chemistry, cell and molecular biology, genomics and proteomics, clinical virology, flow cytometry and imaging provides support for internal and external student/faculty researchers for equipment requirements that cannot be ordinarily met from individual grants. SRIHER is a recipient of infra-structure grants from DST and DBT that support the maintenance and operation of the shared high-end instrumentation. In addition, the campus provides access to an FDA audited Clinical Trials facility as well as a GLP compliant animal house to facilitate pre-clinical and clinical research.
Research@ SRIHER is aiming to achieve milestones that would enable ranking of SRIHER as an Institute of Eminence within the next 5 years.
