Editorial Broad Member, Uddip Talukdar, MD resumes as the Executive Editor of the Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences (OJPAS®). He is the Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed Medical College Hospital, Barpeta, Assam, India.

Dr. Tanica Lyngdoh, MD, MSc, PhD joins the Advisory Board of the Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences (OJPAS®). She is the Additional Professor at Indian Institute of Public Health Delhi, Public Health Foundation of India, Plot 47, Sector-44, Institutional Area Gurgaon, Haryana-122003, India.

Tanica completed her graduation from Lady Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi and has an MD in Community Medicine from University College of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.  She further specialized in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), UK as an external student. She was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation for a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland which she completed in May 2013. Prior to her PhD, she has several years of experience working in a large population-based project in collaboration with the LSHTM. Her primary focus has been in the area of preventive cardiology, in particular cardio-metabolic risks and diseases.  Her PhD focused on the epidemiology of cardio-metabolic abnormalities, in particular, evaluating genetic and non-genetic associations of uric acid and kidney function with blood pressure and other metabolic abnormalities. This work involved association analyses in multiple population-based epidemiological studies in Switzerland and Seychelles, including complex and robust statistical analysis of family data and analysis of human genetic data. This work was accepted for several financial grants that allowed her to present her work at various international conferences and has resulted in several publications in peer-reviewed medical journals. She was awarded the prize of the “Fondation de Medicine Sociale et Preventive” from the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne for her PhD work and she won the the Swiss School of Public Health Plus (SSPH+) award for the best published PhD article in Public Health.

Currently as a faculty at the Institute, she is engaged in research activities and is actively involved in training and teaching programmes in epidemiology, biostatistics, public health and clinical research.

Her current focus is working with the health systems, in particular, in implementation research and is actively engaged with the state governments. She collaborated with MEASURE Evaluation, USA to successfully pilot a conceptual framework that acknowledges the broader context in which routine health information system (RHIS) operates, known as Performance of Routine Information System Management (PRISM) in one of the Indian states. She supported the National Health Mission, Haryana in a capacity building initiative to promote the use of routine data among health care professionals at district and sub-district levels. In continuation to this piece of work, she led a WHO-funded project determine the barriers and facilitators of data utilization amongst different levels of healthcare professionals. She was part of the team from PHFI who supported the adaptation of the “RHIS curriculum on basics concepts and practice” developed by MEASURE Evaluation to the Indian context. She is leading projects to support Government of Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Jharkhand respectively in strengthening their state institutes of health and family welfare and upgrading them to state-of-the-art institutes.

Her other area of interest include cardiovascular risks and diseases, statistical methods, applied statistics, metabolic abnormalities, life-course epidemiology, genetic epidemiology, clinical research design, maternal and child health, and mental health epidemiology.

Samrat Bhandari, the Assistant Editor of the Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences (OJPAS®) is certified as reviewer for the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine (IJPM).