Krishnan Radhakrishnan, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., is Director of the Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality (CBHSQ) within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the lead agency for behavioral health statistics, as designated by the Office of Management and Budget. He is board certified in public health and general preventive medicine. Prior to joining SAMHSA, Dr. Radhakrishnan served as an epidemiologist at the Clinical Epidemiology Research Center (CERC), Veterans Administration Connecticut Healthcare System, West Haven, CT, where he worked and published extensively on several projects on veteran mental health and other medical topics including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and suicidal behavior, substance abuse, Gulf War Illness, prediabetes and prostate cancer.
Dr. Radhakrishnan received his residency training in general preventive medicine and public health at University of Kentucky, Lexington, where he served as chief resident and also earned an M.P.H. with a concentration in epidemiology. As an American Cancer Society Fellow, his work focused on cancer prevention and control. He previously had worked at the NIH-supported New Mexico Center for the Spatiotemporal Modeling of Cell Signaling, where his research focused on mathematical and computational modeling of the highly networked, complex pathways in signal transduction, including effects of receptor clustering on the plasma membrane and membrane structure.
Dr. Radhakrishnan’s career path has been anything but traditional. At an early age he showed strong aptitude for mathematics and the physical sciences, and was guided toward a career in engineering. He graduated with honors in mechanical engineering from Imperial College London. After earning an M.S. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Radhakrishnan conducted research at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, focusing on mathematical/computational modeling of combustion, with applications in aero and space propulsion. Dr. Radhakrishnan later adapted these oxygen-based physicochemical numerical methods to model the chemical pathways arising in human metabolism and cell signaling.
When his mother experienced serious health problems, Dr. Radhakrishnan performed extensive research to understand her condition. This experience rekindled a long-standing interest in medicine, and demonstrated to him the importance of clinical practice in medical research. Returning to school, Dr. Radhakrishnan earned his M.D. degree from Case Western Reserve University. His career path then took him back to NASA, where he collaborated on several projects involving retinal vascular remodeling with progression of diabetes. This work led to discoveries in early-stage vascular remodeling that are being investigated further with new NIH-supported studies on diabetic retinopathy. The corresponding retinal vascular analytic methods are also being used successfully for applications in assessing visual complications in astronauts after long-term spaceflight.
Dr. Radhakrishnan has broad-based research experiences in the clinical, epidemiological, biomedical and physical sciences, supported by extensive computational modeling, data analysis, interpretation and synthesis. This experience has proven very useful for providing evidence-based scientific and clinical assistance and expertise to staff and senior members and for identifying and evaluating project needs and shortfalls. Together with medical and public health training, these experiences equip him to communicate, collaborate and work effectively with diverse clinical, medical research and public health policy teams and community organizations, and to provide clinical, scientific, quantitative and programmatic advice, recommendations and guidance.
Last Updated: 10/06/2020