Radhika Sundararajan, MD, PhD

Radhika Sundararajan, M.D., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Weill Cornell Center for Global Health. She received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, her medical degree from New York University School of Medicine, and completed residency training at the Massachusetts General and Brigham & Women’s Hospitals. She is a board-certified Emergency Physician who conducts research on barriers to evidence-based healthcare. 

Specifically, Dr. Sundararajan’s work seeks to improve uptake of healthcare services in global, low-resource settings, with particular focus on improving HIV-related clinical outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. Her work has shown that informal healthcare providers, such as traditional healers, have strong influence over their clients’ health-seeking trajectories, and should be considered key stakeholders for HIV control program in endemic regions. With local academic and community partners, Dr. Sundararajan conducted hybrid effectiveness-implementation trials in East Africa where traditional healers delivered point-of-care HIV testing directly to clients of unknown HIV serostatus. She currently leads an R01 study evaluating the integration of traditional healers into the HIV care cascade (MH132440). She also serves as co-PI on an R01 study (HD112141) of community health workers to improve gestational and post-partum diabetes screening among women in urban slums of India.