Dr. Gitanjali Batmanabane did her undergraduate and postgraduate training from the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research (JIPMER), Puducherry and her Ph.D. from Pondicherry University. She is the Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar and had also held additional charge of AIIMS Patna as Director previously. Presently she is the mentor Director for AIIMS Kalyani and AIIMS Guwahati. Prior to joining AIIMS Bhubaneswar, she was Senior Professor and Head of Pharmacology at JIPMER. For a brief span of two years (from 2010 to 2012), she worked as Technical Officer, Essential Medicines & Other Drugs, at the World Health Organization, South East Asia Regional Office, New Delhi and coordinated the Better Medicines for Children project in India. She was a member of the National Teacher Training Centre core-group at JIPMER and was Head of the Dept. of Medical Education at JIPMER. She is a member of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Expert Committee on the Selection and Use of Essential Medicines and is also a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Evaluation. She was Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Essential Medicines and Rational Use of Medicines at JIPMER. She has conducted many workshops on Elementary Biomedical Statistics, Research Methodology and Biomedical Communication all over India. Her area of interest is essential medicines and rational use of medicines and medical education. She has many publications in national and international journals.
