Chittaranjan Yajnik, Professor - India

Professor Chittaranjan Yajnik is the Director of the Diabetes Unit at the King Edward Memorial Hospital and Research Centre, Pune, India. He trained in Pune, India and Oxford, UK. His research focuses on the high susceptibility of Indians to diabetes and related disorders, and is known for his description of the ‘thin fat Indian’.

He has a long standing collaboration with David Barker and his colleagues and set up 3 birth cohorts in Pune, which have contributed pioneering ideas in the field of DOHaD (Developmental Origins of Health and Disease). He has collected substantial phenotypic data in a lifecourse model and created a unique biobank of samples from many studies.

As the Danish Diabetes Academy Visiting Professor, he will spend upto 6 months in Denmark in 2017 to collaborate with Danish experts to discuss collaborative ideas to investigate diabetes susceptibility, exploiting the substantial differences between Indians and the Scandinavians. He will be hosted by Professor Henning Beck Nielsen, but will travel across Denmark to give seminars in different departments and interact with scientists, PhD students and Post Docs.