Subramanian Research Group

The overarching goal of this project is to improve precision public policy, public financing, and governance in India related to population health and development by:

1) collating and analyzing key population health and development data that are geocoded to multiple micro and macro public policy units (namely Gram Panchayat (GP), Assembly Constituency (AC), and Parliamentary Constituency (PC));

2) developing intelligent public data and analytics platform to disseminate the data and findings in an interactive way;

3) engaging with multiple stakeholders, including elected representatives, bureaucratic leaderships, citizen groups, policy advocacy groups, and academics, to enhance knowledge translation and foster evidence-based policy discussion, formulation, and action. Learn more.

Interventions targeted towards health and well-being are typically assessed by quantifying average differences between groups on an outcome of interest. In the presence of considerable systematic heterogeneity within population between individuals, the practice of focusing exclusively on “Average Treatment Effect” (ATE) can be inefficient, wasteful, and raise legitimate concerns related to communicating scientific findings to the lay population in a meaningful manner.

The researchers in this project will set out to develop a refined approach to quantifying health and well-being that incorporates individual heterogeneity into average assessments, potentially resulting in a more efficient and accurate way to assess the effectiveness of health-related interventions.

Dr. Subramanian is an expert of multilevel statistical models. In his research, he employs such methods to investigate the reciprocal and dynamic relationships between macro socioeconomic environments (e.g., income inequality, social capital, and neighborhood disadvantage) and individual health. Dr. Subramanian was the first to develop a course on the concept and application of multilevel statistical methods at Harvard, which he has taught since 2001.

One of Dr. Subramanian’s research focal areas is the food, diet, and nutrition of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). His work in this area includes cross-sectional studies of food consumption patterns of populations across the life course. Recent work has focused on the prevalence of “zero-food children” around the world, with findings indicating that the prevalence of children who did not consume any milk, formula, or food in the previous 24 hours to be as high as 21% in some countries (Karlsson et al., JAMA Network Open 2024). It is a goal of this research to provide policymakers with new insights into the challenges of food insecurity and to assist in the implementation of evidence-based policies and programs.

A portion of Dr. Subramanian’s expertise lies in his work developing and applying state-of-the-art data science solutions to harness geographic data to better understand variations in health. He is the principal investigator of the Geographic Insights Lab, which produces fine-grained data to visualize population needs while highlighting stark disparities within and across geographic units. His recent work breaks down population health needs at the congressional district level in the U.S. and down to the village level in India.

Dr. Subramanian is the lead of the India Policy Insights (IPI) project, which is a collaborative initiative of the Geographic Insights Lab at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, and Korea University.

IPI seeks to promote evidence-based policy deliberation, formulation, and action with its comprehensive online geovisual data platform. Using novel methodologies, IPI provides value-added data for health, nutrition, and population indicators for India’s districts, parliamentary constituencies, assembly constituencies, and villages. His work in the sector is ongoing, and he has published extensively in this area.

Dr. Subramanian has worked to develop a cross-comparative perspective on socioeconomic and geographic axes of health stratification. His research is global in scale, and as such requires multiple lens of analyses. His work functions both on a large, global scale and smaller, micro-level scales. He also aims to understand patterns of heterogeneity across populations. Dr. Subramanian’s research is informed by the understanding that even on the smallest of geographical scales, populations cannot be treated as homogeneous, nor can they be evaluated in comparison with other populations without accounting for factors that may be interdependent with health, such as socioeconomic stratification.

In some of his work, Dr. Subramanian utilizes electoral/political geography to map population health. In his work on health in the U.S., his project USA Policy Insights seeks to promote evidence-based policy deliberation, formulation, and action with its comprehensive online geo-visual data platform for health, wellbeing, and population indicators for the U.S.. Using modern methods, USA Policy Insights provides value-added data for critical indicators for multiple geographies that are of public policy relevance. In particular, he has published extensively on the geography of congressional districts.