Poornima is a physican and epidemiologist working in public health in India for nearly two decades. Her earlier focus was on the lifecourse approach to cardiovascular diseases and their risk factors . She worked with birth cohorts in India and other developing countries exploring during her doctoral work the intergenerational transmission of risk in the Andhra Pradesh Children and Parents Study. Her focus in recent years has been on the role of environmental risk factors on the health of children and adults in India. In her current role as Director of the Centre for Health Analytics Research and Trends at Ashoka University's Trivedi School of Biosciences, Poornima and her team have developed a unique exposure model for ambient particulate matter PM 2.5 and temperature for the entire country which can be leveraged to examine associations of these environmental exposures on a range of disease outcomes. She has a particular interest in addressing the health impacts of climate change.