Ranu Dhillon, M.D. was raised in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of immigrants from Punjab, India. Growing up with peers from the inner city, he was exposed early on to the challenges of poverty and has committed himself to ameliorating its hardships. Prior to medical school, he spent several months with a community development organization in Punjab, counseling internally displaced children orphaned by political violence. During medical school he founded Roses from the Concrete, a project geared towards developing leadership potential among inner city and immigrant youth in Philadelphia. He also helped found and coordinate a health outreach project that brought health services to refugee and immigration communities. As an international director with a WHO-affiliated global medical student organization, he collaborated with students from all over the world to create several innovative programs including a refugee health training held in Pakistan and a health development conference for students from all over Africa. Before graduating medical school, he spent nearly two years with the Millennium Villages Project in Rwanda where, as Health Coordinator, he helped establish a health system serving approximately 25,000 people and worked with the Ministry of Health on national policy matters. Since 2007, he has been a health advisor with the Millennium Villages Project and worked on health financing, policy, and systems issues in Ghana, Tanzania, and Mali. He now works as a technical consultant to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in Liberia. As a Global Health Equity resident, he welcomes the opportunity to refine his clinical skills to optimally care for patients, and to gain the training in agriculture, development and policy necessary to implement strategies that can change situations of poverty.