Manisha Kulkarni
BSc, PhD
Dr. Manisha Kulkarni is an Associate Professor in the School of Epidemiology & Public Health at the University of Ottawa. She holds a PhD in Entomology and brings over fifteen years of experience in characterizing vector-borne disease risk in global settings, with an interest in the impacts of environmental changes on disease emergence and transmission. Prior to joining the University of Ottawa in 2014, Dr. Kulkarni completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Canadian Facility for Ecoinformatics Research at the University of Ottawa, and held positions as an Epidemiologist at the Centre for Food-Borne, Environmental and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and Health Specialist at the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). She currently leads the CIHR-funded project Public Health Risk Assessment Tools for Emerging Vector-borne Diseases 2.0 which aims to develop practical risk maps and models to inform public health action on Lyme and other tick-borne diseases in Ottawa, in addition to funding from the PHAC Infectious Diseases and Climate Change Fund, NSERC, and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
Dr. Kulkarni is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Spatial Informatics for Global Health (INSIGHT) research lab. INSIGHT is uniquely equipped to identify pathogens in disease vectors using molecular diagnostic approaches, conduct epidemiological studies, and perform geospatial analysis of health and environmental data. Their current research applies population survey methods, entomological field sampling, molecular analyses, and GIS to examine seasonal and spatial patterns of disease transmission, identify populations at risk, and evaluate the impact of interventions.
Dr. Kulkarni is a Principal Applicant on the grant. She will Co-lead research activities in risk reduction and prevention. She will especially oversee Ottawa site activities.