Dr Priscilla Rupali is Sr. Professor & Head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Christian Medical College Vellore in South India. She has worked in New Zealand and United States for her period of ID training. She has obtained a “Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene” at the Universidad Cayetano Heredia at Lima Peru affiliated to the University of Alabama Birmingham. She runs a very popular Clinical Tropical Medicine course at CMC Vellore annually which provides lectures, bedside sessions and laboratory sessions by internationally acclaimed faculty. She also pioneered the course “Fellowship in General Infectious Diseases” which aims to equip the physicians working in secondary/tertiary care settings to diagnose, investigate and make appropriate treatment plans for patients with various Infectious Diseases. She is also collaborated with Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) India and initiated the ‘Global Health and Humanitarian Medicine’ programme for medical doctors to provide high-quality training in tropical medicine and public health to improve patient and programmatic care in low-and-middle-income countries, including humanitarian crisis contexts. She initiated “The Fellowship in Antimicrobial Stewardship for Pharmacists” as well to provide clinical pharmacists with training and expertise to establish their position as an integral part of the infection control and antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) team.
She has obtained a Fellowship in “Transplant Infectious Diseases” at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan and has been instrumental in establishing Transplant related services in her hospital and has been the founder of the Transplant Infectious Diseases Conference in India in collaboration with the Indian Society of Organ transplantation. She has also been instrumental in setting up and antimicrobial stewardship program not only in her hospital but also runs a very sought after “Fellowship in General ID” which helps physicians implement antimicrobial stewardship at secondary or tertiary care settings. She has multiple grants in the fields of antibiotic stewardship, brain infections as well as systematic reviews and guideline development. She was the chair of the India covid guidelines which pioneered the first of it’s kind a rapid review of all therapeutic interventions in COVID-19 with multiple Indian physicians participating in this process and coming up with a guideline contextualized to the Indian setting. https:/indiacovidguidelines.org. She is also spearheading a brain infection guideline in the country which she hopes will pave the way for all the guidelines in the country following evidence-based medicine.
She holds extensive knowledge and experience in the field of enteric fever leading a number of studies with emphasis on treatment and multidrug resistance of Salmonella.The Infectious Diseases Department at CMC Vellore has been a pioneer in promoting Infectious Diseases as a clinical specialty in India and now is the 2nd Department to run the DM in Infectious Diseases in the Country.