Jeeva Sankar

Jeeva has been the Director of the ICMR National Institute of Child Health Research (NICHR), New Delhi, since March 2026. He is on deputation from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, where he works as a Professor of Pediatrics (Neonatology).

He is a neonatologist and clinical researcher whose work centers on neonatal sepsis, newborn care, and evidence-based child health. He has led multicenter studies on the epidemiology and antimicrobial resistance patterns of neonatal sepsis in tertiary care hospitals in Delhi and special newborn care units in district hospitals across India. He is the principal investigator of a multi-institutional research program on neonatal sepsis biology funded by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, and is leading a stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial evaluating immediate kangaroo mother care in district hospitals in Chhattisgarh. His multisite studies on multidrug-resistant neonatal sepsis have been published in The Lancet Global Health and The BMJ.

Jeeva has conducted around 50 systematic reviews and contributed evidence to eight World Health Organization guidelines on newborn health. He serves on national and international scientific and advisory panels, including WHO guideline and technical groups, and collaborates on the Global Burden of Disease study with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

He has published over 185 papers in peer-reviewed journals and has been listed in the global database of the top 2% of scientists for six consecutive years (2019–2024). He is an editor of AIIMS Protocols in Neonatology, Co-Chair of the Editorial Group of the NNF Clinical Practice Guidelines, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences (FAMS).