Dr. Kusuma is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology at Khalifa University. His teaching and research are centered on assessing national health systems and evaluating health interventions at both the population and health systems levels. His primary interests include the prevention of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, focusing on modifiable risk factors such as obesity, smoking, and unhealthy diets. He has expertise in policy impact evaluation, quantitative methods, econometrics, and geospatial analysis.
Before joining Khalifa University, Dr. Kusuma was a Lecturer in Global Health at St. George’s, University of London. Prior to that, he served as a Research Associate at Imperial College London, contributing to the NIHR Global Health Research Unit project. This initiative aimed to develop scalable, sustainable, and equitable approaches to reduce the burden of type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease in South Asia, encompassing India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Kusuma was a Research Associate at Harvard University, where he worked on the Malaysia Health Systems Research project. In collaboration with Harvard faculty and the Malaysian Ministry of Health, he conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the nation’s health system performance, health financing, and service delivery. He also led the design of a large-scale mixed-methods cluster randomized impact evaluation of an enhanced primary health care intervention targeting cardiovascular risk factors.
