Ruma Rajbhandari, MD, MPH was first exposed to health disparities before college when she volunteered with a grassroots health project called Social Action Volunteers (SAV) based in the only children’s hospital in Nepal. Throughout medical school, Dr. Rajbhandari sought out opportunities to continue health related work in her native country of Nepal. In January of 2005, she did a one-month Medicine sub-internship at Patan Hospital, a busy, 250-bed, urban hospital in Kathmandu. Dr. Rajbhandari has also been a consultant to the Nick Simmons Institute of Rural Health Care Training in Nepal where she was gathered data from seven rural hospitals and developed recommendations on the establishment of the Rural Staff Support Program (RSSP), aimed at retaining health care workers in remote areas.

Dr. Rajbhandari earned her BS in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental, Biology in 2002, her MPH with a concentration in International Health from Harvard School of Public Health in 2007 and her MD from Harvard Medical School in 2007. Her research includes a study of HIV related stigma as a barrier to HIV testing in rural Haiti and a study of the demographics of corneal donors in Nepal.