Dr Shrestha is an HDR scholar at La Trobe University under the School of Psychology and Public Health. Dr Abha Shrestha is the Community Medicine specialist. Her PhD is focused on scalability and sustainability of structured lifestyle interventions in low- and middle-income countries. She is focusing on identifying gap in implementation and the process of scale up including codesigning and adaptation of proven interventions. She is also examining the sustainability of effects of level of participation in structured lifestyle intervention, how groups are influenced in a long term.

Dr Shrestha completed her residency in Community Medicine and Tropical Diseases from B.P Koirala institute of Health Sciences and is associated with Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel Hospital in Nepal. She is a Coordinator at Nepal National Non-Communicable Diseases, Injury and Poverty (NCDIP) Commission (formed under the auspices of the Lancet Commission). Dr Shrestha was a fellow for Translational Research on Cardiovascular Diseases in Nepal (TREIN), National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, National Institute of Health, USA. Dr Shrestha is a scholar of Global Health Delivery Intensive at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, USA.

Dr Shrestha is interested in Implementation Science research, NCDs and innovative health system strengthening approaches, Health Literacy and empowering the patients in their management of chronic diseases. She initiated Hypertension and Diabetes chronic care model in the outreach centers of Dhulikhel hospital. She also initiated a community-based blood collection, medicine refill and counseling of patients of Dhulikhel Hospital at Dhulikhel, Panauti and Banepa Municipality. She started a Home-based nursing care for the debilitating and elderly individuals of Dhulikhel Municipality and completed a family health profiling at Panchkhal Municipality in Nepal. 

Dr Shrestha was also involved in development of mhealth integrated model, an electronic decision support systems to empower the frontline health worker to screen, detect and refer the Gestational Diabetes and Hypertension and management of antenatal care in rural Nepal. She is currently involved in implementation studies and trials that addresses to improve diabetes through behavioral and dietary intervention studies, development and implementation of mhealth application for the control of hypertension in Nepal and India.