Dr Rampal is a Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health. He is a Public Health Physician and heads the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya. He also chairs the National Conjoint Committee for Public Health Postgraduate Medical Program, Malaysia. He is a leader in Public Health Education and NCD Research.

Dr Rampal was medically trained in India and served in the Ministry of Health Malaysia from 1998 to 2005. The clinical experiences from his early medical career helped him realize that treating one patient at a time was not sufficient and more could be done by intervening at a population level. He improved his basic epidemiology and biostatistics knowledge by completing an MPH degree in 2004 from Harvard University. He joined the University of Malaya in 2005 with the idea that intervening at the graduate level would improve the research skills of the medical and public health community. He completed his PhD in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University in 2014. He was Certified in Public Health (CPH) by the US National Board of Public Health Examiners in 2013.

Dr Rampal’s research focuses on the epidemiology and prevention of cardiovascular disease, with an emphasis on nutrition, obesity, diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and dyslipidemia. He is particularly interested in elucidating their roles as upstream factors utilizing common major pathways leading to the different Non Communicable Diseases. He is also actively investigating the role of Obesity and Diabetes on the prognosis of Dengue Severity. He hopes to further leverage this information to design and implement better prevention programs that ultimately reduces the number of new patients seen by our healthcare system. His methodological interest includes improving research methodology, biostatistics, epidemiological designs, regression models, causal inference, multiple imputations, measurement error, and propensity scoring.

Dr Rampal actively lectures in the fields of epidemiology, biostatistics, and research methods. He has supervised 3 Doctoral and numerous Master candidates to completion. He actively supervises 10+ doctoral students. He has provided numerous methodological and biostatistical consultations to graduate students and clinical researchers. Dr Rampal has published 80 peer-reviewed research papers, of which 73 are ISI indexed, and has an h-index of 24 with 6000+ citations.

 

Dr Rampal is the chairman for the Public Health Society, Malaysian Medical Association, and is a member of various international associations such as International Epidemiology Association, American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, Society for Epidemiology Research. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medicine Malaysia and was the past honorary secretary for the College of Public Health Medicine from 2006-2009. He has been an executive committee member for the College of Public Health Medicine since 2016.