Education

Post-doctoral fellow (Centre for Internet of Ethical Things, IIIT-Bangalore)
PhD in IT and Health Systems (IIIT-Bangalore)
Master’s in Dental Surgery with specialisation in Public Health Dentistry (RGUHS, Karnataka)
Master’s in Hospital Administration (ICFAI University), BDS (GDC, Calicut, Kerala)

Profile

As an accomplished healthcare professional with over 20 years of cross-functional experience, I have worked at the nexus of digital innovation, public health, clinical care, and health systems administration. My goal is driven towards strengthening India’s Health System using a holistic lens-a systems-based approach, an operational research concept- to carefully understand complex problems and craft desirable and feasible solutions. With over 11 years of clinical practice and academic work in Public Health Dentistry, including hands-on experience in oral cancer prevention, early detection, and community-based screening programs and risk management programs such as tobacco control, cessation activities, nutrition-related disorders, I bring a deep understanding of real-world healthcare challenges, particularly in resource-constrained settings of the Indian context. With 2 years of experience in management sciences, including teaching and industry roles, I bring transformational leadership—critical for driving institutions focused on next-generation outcome-based teaching.
Over the past 7+ years, I have led R&D initiatives in digital health and health systems, including the design and implementation of scalable, tech-enabled public health solutions and governance frameworks in collaboration with government stakeholders. My PhD work has resulted in an ICT-enabled application for tracking and managing malnutrition in the state of Karnataka. As a Post-Doctoral fellow, I currently engage with designing and developing of technology assessment framework from an ethical perspective in domains like smart cities, digital health and agri-tech. This work has given a governance framework for ethical assessment of such technologies in the state of Karnataka.

My experience spans teaching and research, strategic operations, innovation management, and stakeholder engagement. I offer a unique ability to align multidisciplinary teams, translate clinical needs into technological solutions, and drive systemic digital transformation

Research Interests

• Technology ethics and governance, Developing ethical frameworks for assessment of IoTs/AI in complex systems (smart cities, healthcare and agriculture)
• Health technology Assessment (HTA)
• Theories and methodologies in Management Information Systems (MIS domain), holistic approaches like systems thinking and complexity theory, the applications of which find place in Operations Research
• Digital health product/project design & implementation including Health Information Systems(HIS)
• Health care management
• Hospital Administration
• Health policy analysis and recommendations
• Human-Computer interaction
• Trustworthy and Responsible Technology Innovation
• Population health, epidemiology, and Chronic Care management (eg: malnutrition management, tobacco control, oral cancer)

Publications

• Wadhwa, M., Pandya, A., & Austin, D. (2025). Change management in public health. In S. Goel, K. Upadhyay, & N. Bhatnagar (Eds.), Global public health perspectives on leadership and management (pp. 144-161). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.ISBN:978-1-0364-4272-9
• Austin, D., Singh, S., Prakash, A., Venumuddala, V. R., & Ganeshan, S. (2024, October). Mapping Accountability in Human-AI Partnerships in Healthcare: Towards a Patient-centric Approach. In 2024 IEEE 12th Region 10 Humanitarian Technology Conference (R10-HTC) (pp. 1-8). IEEE
• Austin, Deepa, ‘Systems thinking to design integrated health information systems: Navigating the complexity of malnutrition management in the Indian context’ (2023). ICIS 2023 TREOS. 94.https://aisel.aisnet.org/treos_icis2023/94.
• Austin, D. (2023). 65th Annual Conference of ‘The Operational Research Society’. The OR society. https://or65-abstract-book.pdf (theorsociety.com)
• BA Correya, Mohan S, Siby S, Austin D (2023). Mental Health Status of Dental Professionals Posted For Swab Collection Duty during COVID-19: A Cross-Sectional Study. IOSR Journal of Dental and Medical Sciences, e-ISSN: 2279-0853, p-ISSN: 2279-0861.Volume 22, Issue 3 Ser.11, PP 58-61
• Austin, D., Prakash, A., Bhushan .S, (2022). Complexity demands agility: operationalizing agile principles to address complex public health challenge of malnutrition management in proceedings of 12th ICTD conference, University of Washington, Seattle, June 26-28, 2022.https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3572334.3572370
• Austin, D., & Prakash, A. (2021). Connecting the Dots in Nutritional Rehabilitation: A Qualitative Study on ICT and Community Based Care. Proceedings of the IFIP 9.4 Virtual Conference on Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development, pp. 322-334, 26-28 May 2021.arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.09751.
• Austin, D., JayaKumar, H. L., Chandra, K. M., Kemparaj, V., & Prahladka, P. (2020). Cross-sectional Study on White Spot Lesions and its Association with Dental Caries Experience among School Children. International journal of clinical pediatric dentistry, 13(2), 107–112. https://doi.org/10.5005/jp-journals-10005-1716
• Austin, D. (2017). Clinical Pattern and Severity of Early Childhood Caries and its Association with Dietary Index and Age-Specific Body Mass Index in Children Aged 30 71 Months in Bengaluru South (Doctoral dissertation, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (India).