Sunitha C Srinivas

Biography

"Sunitha Srinivas graduated with a Bachelor of Pharmacy in 1992 and began her career as a lecturer in India. After completing her Masters degree in Pharmacy, she returned to academics. She then accepted the position of Deputy Director, Drug Information Center in Karnataka State Pharmacy Council which soon led her to opportunities in the area of public health. After being trained at an intensive World Health Organisation international courses, she was nominated as the Technical Coordinator by the Delhi Society for Promotion of Rational Use of Drugs, to initiate and manage the provincial India- WHO Essential Medicines Program, Karnataka from 2000-2003. While managing the WHO program, she underwent further training in various international courses in relevant areas of rational use of medicines. As the first global recipient of the scholarship from the Pharmabridge program- an International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) sub-group initiative- she was trained by the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, Pharmacy department, Madison and St. Louis College of Pharmacy, Missouri, United States of America. She also worked briefly as a consultant on a World Bank project in Karnataka Health Systems Development Project in conducting the medicine indicator use study in the public sector hospitals in Karnataka . In 2003 she joined Rhodes University as an Associate Professor and has pursued consolidating her academic career, based on the strong foundation of field experiences from the WHO program. She focuses on teaching access to essential medicines, medicines information and criteria for pharmaceutical promotion for the second and third year pharmacy students. She focuses on introduction to global health and environmental health for first year pharmacy students. Non communicable diseases and environmental health based projects are her focus for fourth year pharmacy students. The three pillars of Rhodes University: Teaching and Learning, Research and Community Engagement are the building blocks of this phase. Prof. Srinivas focuses on service-learning projects that encompass teaching, research and community engagement. She has supervised Master’s students and co supervised PhD students and publishes in national and international peer reviewed accredited journals. Prof. Srinivas has focused on research supervision in the areas of health education for patients with non-communicable diseases (NCD) such as hypertension and asthma, operational research in the management of HIV/AIDS program in the public sector and access to essential medicines. Community based participatory research in the areas of maternal and child health is another focal area of research, community engagement and capacity building and mentoring of future researchers/ academics with support from a new prestigious Sandisa Imbewu funding from Rhodes University in 2011. Prof. Srinivas’s most recent professional achievement is being one of the recipients of the 2014 National Teaching Excellence Awards jointly made by the Council on Higher Education and the Higher Education Learning & Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA). Another important achievement is being a recipient of the University of Oxford Fellowship under the Association of Commonwealth Universities Titular Fellowship. This Fellowship supported a research opportunity from July to August 2014 at the British Heart Foundation Centre on Population Approaches for NCD Prevention, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford. She has been a recipient of the Commendation Award from the Council of Higher Education, South Africa, 2011 as a part of National Excellence in Teaching and Learning Awards 2011. Since February 2014, she is also the staff coordinator /mentor for Rhodes University Pharmacy Students Association (RUPSA) to collaborate for various community engagement activities for youth development programs in Grahamstown. "

Research Interest

Health promotion: Social change, communication amongst chronic patients: Operational research in pharmaceutical management.