Omkar Nadh Pattela

Omkar is a postdoctoral fellow at IIHS working with the Urban Health team in the PEAK project. He is also a part of the ongoing research on municipalisation and financialisation of municipal corporations that has led to institutional or organisational transformation.

In the Urban Health stream, he researches on healthcare seeking behavior of the low-income households in the context of non-communicable diseases particularly focusing on hypertension, diabetes and asthma.

Prior to joining IIHS, he completed his PhD dissertation titled ‘Bio political economy of medical biotechnology in India: constitution of patient-consumer subjectivities’ from the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. In his thesis, he examined the role of various actors including state and its institutions, financial actors and academia in the constitution of a medical biotechnology ecosystem in India. Further, he has also examined the increasing prevalence of personalised medicine particularly in the context of genomic diagnostic tests and the concomitant practices of value extraction.

Omkar’s areas of interest include critical social theory, political economy, science technology society studies, financialisation, data capitalism and public health.