Dinesh Mohan has been involved in injury control research for the past 25 years. He obtained a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, a master's degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of Delaware, USA and a PhD in bioengineering from the University of Michigan, USA. He started his research career at the Biomechanics Department of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute at Ann Arbor where he specialised in biomechanics of impacts and human tolerance research. He continued this work at the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, Washington DC, where he worked with William Haddon and did projects on injuries due to free falls, baseball impacts to the head, evaluation of the effectiveness of airbags in cars, injuries to children in cars, and the clasping strength of adults in holding children in laps in cars.

Currently he is a Professor in the Centre for Biomedical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India, and Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Safety Technology. His current interests include research on transportation injuries with a special focus on vulnerable road users and injuries in rural areas. He serves on many national and international advisory groups including the injury prevention programme of the WHO. He is a Vice President of the International Association for Accidents and Traffic Medicine and a board member of the International Research Council on the Biomechanics of Impact. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Accident Analysis and Prevention and Injury Prevention. He has published over a hundred papers and is the coauthor of the book Injury Control: A Global View. He has received the Association for Advancement of Automotive Medicine 1991 Award of Merit for outstanding research in traffic safety, and the International Association for Accident and Traffic Medicine award and medal for outstanding achievement in the field of traffic medicine.