Dr. Mehta is a physician and an epidemiologist with expertise in infectious disease, nutrition, maternal and child health, and diagnostics. The central theme of his research is the interplay between nutrition and infection, including facilitating field-friendly assessment for both, and elucidating how nutrition can be used as a modifiable risk factor for infections and associated outcomes, often in the context of pregnancy and early childhood. This is achieved through a combination of active surveillance programs, invention of point-of-care diagnostics for nutrition and infection, and randomized controlled trials primarily in resource-limited settings in South Asia (India), South America (Ecuador), and Sub-Saharan Africa (Tanzania and Kenya).
Dr. Mehta is currently the Principal Investigator on two randomized efficacy trials to determine the effect of delivering micronutrients through biofortified crops on nutrition and immune function in infants in India. David Erickson and Dr. Mehta are also the co-inventors of the Cornell NutriPhone and FeverPhone, a NSF- and NIH-funded platform for point-of-care diagnosis of nutritional status and infections.
Dr. Mehta also serves as a consultant to the World Health Organization on topics such as tuberculosis, nutrition, and diagnostic test accuracy. This also involved recently serving as the external expert on Emergency Guideline Development Meeting for Zika virus and publishing the first systematic review on mother to child transmission of Zika virus, that served as the basis for the current guidelines on this topic.