Juwel Rana, PhD, MPH (Dual), MSS
Research & Innovation Division, South Asian Institute for Social Transformation (SAIST), Bangladesh
Dr. Juwel Rana is an environmental epidemiologist who earned his PhD in Epidemiology from the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill University, Canada. His research integrates causal inference methods and exposome approaches to investigate how complex environmental, nutritional, and social exposures jointly shape population health and health inequities across the life course.
He extended standard Quantile G-computation to Time-varying Quantile G-computation and implemented it in the R package tvcQGComp. He also adapted Weighted Quantile Sum (WQS) regression for mediation analysis to investigate pathways linking environmental mixtures to health outcomes. His empirical research draws on large-scale population cohorts across North America and Asia, including CanCHEC and MIREC in Canada, GUSTO in Singapore, and BEST and BLADES in Bangladesh.
He is the Founder and serves as the Director of Research and Innovation at the South Asian Institute for Social Transformation (SAIST). His path began during undergraduate studies at the University of Dhaka, where he laid the groundwork for what became SAIST, initially taking shape as YRIDB and SAYRID on 15 July 2010, driven by a dedicated group of young researchers.
Juwel leads its flagship study, the Bangladesh Longitudinal Child-Adolescent Development, Education, and Environment Study (BLADES) cohort (2021), involving children, adolescents, and their family members from ~2,500 households in Dhaka and Dinajpur districts.