Dr. Mathuram Santosham

Director, Center for American Indian Health

Professor, International Health and Pediatrics

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Dr. Santosham serves as the director for the Center for American Indian and Alaskan Native Health. He is also a professor in the Department of International Health, and the Department of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He serves on numerous national and international committees on infant vaccines and oral rehydration therapy. He has acted as consultant for several international agencies including WHO, USAID and UNICEF and has provided consultation on various aspects of child survival in over 30 countries. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Hib Initiative, an effort funded by GAVI to promote the integration of Hib vaccine into immunization programs around the world.

Dr. Mathuram Santosham obtained his MBBS degree from the Jawaharlal Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) in Pondicherry, India. He obtained an MPH degree from Johns Hopkins University (JHU), and completed a fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at JHU in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Dr. Santosham has conducted numerous vaccine efficacy trials, including rotavirus vaccine, H. influenzae type b (Hib) conjugate vaccine, and pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in Asia and among American Indian populations. He was the principal investigator (PI) of the pivotal PedvaxHib vaccine trial as well as the Prevnar vaccine efficacy trial on the Navajo and Apache Indian reservations. The data generated by Dr. Santosham and his team contributed to the licensure of both PedvaxHib and Prevnar. He has been the PI of three rotavirus vaccine efficacy trials including the Rotashield and Rotateq trials on the Navajo and Apache Indian reservations. He is currently the PI of the Hib Initiative, which is a 37 million dollar grant awarded to JHU to facilitate the introduction of Hib vaccines in the poorest countries in the world.

Dr. Santosham has published over 200 articles in peer reviewed journals and is the recipient of numerous awards including the prestigious Thrasher Research Fund award for excellence in research. In 2006, he was asked to deliver the key note address (The Robert Austrian Lecture) at an international symposium held in Alice Springs, Australia, and in 2008, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to child health around the world, he was asked to deliver the Maurice Hilleman Memorial Lecture at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.