Research Interests

• Adolescent health: Passionate about working with adolescents to improve health services and outcomes for adolescents through targeted research and intervention programs.
• Health systems research: Focused on analyzing and enhancing health systems to increase efficiency, quality and effectiveness of healthcare delivery.
• Development and implementation of digital health technologies: Conducting two multi centric trials involving mhealth interventions.
• Qualitative and mixed methods research.

Education

• MD in Community Medicine from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
• M.B.B.S. Mysore Medical College and Research Institute, Mysore, Karnataka, India.

Overview

Dr Siddaiah is a medical doctor specialized in Community Medicine. She completed her medical schooling at Mysore Medical College and Research Institute, Mysore, followed by MD training at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. She also worked as a senior resident at the Comprehensive Rural Health Services Project, Ballabgarh, AIIMS, where she widened her understanding of India’s health systems. In 2017, she was selected as a trainee under the Structured Operational Research and Training Initiative (SORT IT), a global partnership led by the Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO/TDR).

Following this, she received a GloCal Fellowship from the University of California Global Health Institute program for Fellows and Scholars funded by the NIH Fogarty International Center. As part of this fellowship, she carried out research on adolescent mental health and completed a diploma in Health Systems from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is co-leading two multi-centric trials to study the effectiveness of mhealth interventions in the area of mental health and antimicrobial stewardship. She has over a decade of teaching and mentoring experience, has mentored MBBS, MD, MPH students, and Nehru-Fulbright scholars, and has secured grants under the Indian Council of Medical Research - Psychiatric Research Infrastructure for Intervention and Implementation in India (PRIIIA) Grantathon program.

At the Isaac Centre for Public Health, Dr Siddaiah’s research involves working with diverse stakeholders to co-design adolescent-friendly interventions that can be implemented at the school, community, and health-system levels to improve the health of adolescents. Currently, she is carrying out mixed-methods participatory research to understand the barriers and facilitators for triple burden of malnutrition among adolescents. She is also working with faculty from Indian and international universities to design nutritional interventions for adolescents. Along with this, she is involved in the validation of AI models for comprehensive ophthalmic diagnostics based on data collected from health systems across India as part of TANUH.