Final Year MTech Students Attend One Health Workshop

Three MTech students from IIT Guwahati received training to bridge human, animal and environmental health at a One Health workshop organised by the Centre for One Health, Education, Research & Development (COHERD), Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhinagar (IIPHG).

Published 25 July 2026 | Category Meetings and Workshops | Office Jyoti and Bhupat Mehta School of Health Sciences and Technology

Three final-year MTech students from the Jyoti and Bhupat Mehta School of Health Science and Technology — Anushka Ghosh, Suprotim Dey and Subhasish Karmakar — recently returned from Gandhinagar after attending the India One Health School Program (IOHSP) 2026, held from 20 to 24 July at the Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhinagar (IIPHG). The students spent the residential programme immersed in sessions, field visits and presentations built around a single idea: that human, animal and environmental health cannot be treated in isolation.

Building the One Health Toolkit

Now in its second edition, IOHSP is organised by the Centre for One Health Education, Research & Development (COHERD) in coordination with the One Health Network of India (OHNI) and the Southeast Asia One Health University Network (SEAOHUN).

The programme forms part of a wider push to build a cadre of "One Health Ambassadors" across the country. Ten institutions sent students this year, spanning veterinary sciences, medicine, biomedical engineering, zoology and botany.

The technical programmes deepened the scientific grounding with two linked sessions on "Emerging and Epidemic-prone Diseases" — first from the human perspective, and then from the animal perspective.

Field Visits: From Ecosystems to Genomics

The workshop also took students out of the classroom to the Centre for Environment Education (CEE), Ahmedabad where they examined how plant ecosystems shape, and are shaped by, climate and environmental health. The group also visited the Gujarat Biotechnology Research Centre, Gandhinagar, to understand disease surveillance work, including the screening of floodwater samples for viral contamination.

The workshop included sessions on Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) at the human-environment and human-animal interfaces. This was followed by a session on the "Action Plan for Containment of Antimicrobial Resistance".

Carrying the Lesson Home

For the IIT Guwahati contingent, the workshop had an impact on how they were thinking about their own research.

Anushka Ghosh, who works on nanoparticle-based biosensors for Alzheimer's disease, sees her work on early detection as inherently interdisciplinary, sitting at the junction of biomedical science and public health. Subhasish Karmakar, whose research lies at the intersection of wound healing and antimicrobial therapies, now weighs the broader consequences of any treatment on resistance and ecosystem health, not just its clinical effectiveness. Suprotim Dey, who works on cancer, points to a specific challenge: immunocompromised cancer patients often depend heavily on antimicrobials, a dependence that feeds directly into antimicrobial resistance, and his future work will look at how that reliance might be minimised or managed.

As Ghosh, Dey and Karmakar carry the One Health framework back into their labs and prepare to organise IIT Guwahati's own peer workshop later this year, their experience reflects the wider ambition behind IOHSP 2026: to move health research away from siloed disease treatment, and towards approaches that are both clinically effective and globally responsible.