Prabhat Jha

Prabhat Jha is Canada research chair of health and development at the University of Toronto . He is also the founding director of the Centre for Global Health Research, St. Michael's Hospital; associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto ; research scholar at the McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine; and professeur extraordinaire at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dr. Jha is lead author of Curbing the Epidemic: Governments and the Economics of Tobacco Control and coeditor of Tobacco Control in Developing Countries . Both are among the most influential books on tobacco control. He is the principal investigator of a prospective study of 1 million deaths in India , researching mortality from smoking, alcohol use, fertility patterns, indoor air pollution, and other risk factors among 2.3 million homes and 15 million people. This work is currently the world's largest prospective study of health. He also conducts studies of HIV transmission in various countries, focusing on documenting the risk factors for the spread of HIV and interventions to prevent the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. His studies have received more than $5 million in peer-reviewed grants.

Dr. Jha has published widely on tobacco, HIV/AIDS, and health of the global poor. His awards include a Gold medal from the Poland Health Promotion Foundation (2000), the Top 40 Canadians under Age 40 Award (2004), and the Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award (2004). Dr. Jha was a research scholar at the University of Toronto and McMaster University in Canada . He holds an M.D. from the University of Manitoba and a D. Phil. in epidemiology and public health from Oxford University , where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College .