Radhika Sundararajan , MD, PhD.
Research Focus: Radhika Sundararajan is an Emergency Physician, Anthropologist and Implementation Scientist. She has been conducting qualitative and mixed-methods research in international settings for over two decades. As a physician-scientist, her expertise lies in understanding social determinants of health which drive utilization of healthcare resources in low-resource settings. Dr. Sundararajan served as PI, Co-Investigator, and consultant for global research focused on infectious (HIV, malaria) and chronic (hypertension, gestational diabetes) diseases, and healthcare services more generally. Her current research focuses on using Implementation Science approaches to design and evaluate healthcare interventions in low resource settings to improve public health outcomes. From 2017-2022, she was recipient of a K23 Career Development award from the National Institute of Mental Health to improve HIV testing uptake among communities who use informal healthcare resources in southwestern Uganda. Their work has shown that informal providers, such as traditional healers, have strong influence over the health behaviors of their patients. They designed a novel point-of-care HIV testing program which was delivered by traditional healers directly to clients of unknown HIV serostatus. They conducted two cluster randomized trials, which have shown that this program significantly improves uptake of HIV testing among adults of unknown HIV serostatus in eastern Africa. She is currently Principal Investigator for an R01 award to conduct an effectiveness-implementation cluster randomized trial to evaluate if traditional healers can provide HIV self-testing and psychosocial support to improve the entire HIV continuum of care. In addition, Dr. Sundararajan is a co-PI on an R01 to evaluate the effectiveness of community health workers to improve screening for gestational and post-partum diabetes among pregnant people in Indian slum communities.
