SHAPING A
Healthy Future

When second-year medical students Rabina Bhandari (Med ’28) and Alessandra Dutra (Med ’28) arrived in India this summer, they were continuing a story that began 14 years ago with the creation of a UVA scholarship that has developed into an international partnership supporting global health.

Left to right: Rabina Bhandari and Alessandra Dutra

The Ram Family Center for Global Health Scholar Award was established in 2011 by Dr. Anil K. Ram (Col ’81, Med ’85) and his wife, Veena Ram, honoring Dr. Ram’s parents, Drs. Bellamane and Anjan Ram, who practiced medicine in India and the United States. The scholarship has supported research and clinical care at the community level in Southern India. The inaugural recipient, Dr. Pranay Sinha (Med ’14), is now an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University whose research focuses on tuberculosis and infectious diseases, with a particular interest in how undernutrition affects tuberculosis outcomes in vulnerable populations. During medical school at UVA, he was a student of Dr. Scott Heysell, director of UVA’s Center for Global Health Equity, and the two have worked closely to develop UVA’s partner site in Pondicherry—the very institute where this year’s Ram Scholars, Bhandari and Dutra, had the opportunity to help with its ongoing research.

“Tuberculosis is the most common worldwide killer from an infection,” Heysell explained. “Basically, what undernutrition does is cause an immunodeficiency; so, in the same way that HIV causes AIDS, this is really a kind of nutritionally related AIDS.”

During their time in Pondicherry, Bhandari and Dutra, in partnership with the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, participated in community-based projects investigating the feasibility of tuberculosis and HIV testing and examining the positive effect of including nutritional interventions as part of patients’ treatment.

Neither Bhandari nor Dutra had traveled to India before, but both have international experience that informs their interest in global health and motivated them to apply for the Ram Family Scholarship. Bhandari has family in Australia and India, and until she was nine years old, she lived in a rural and resource-limited area of Nepal. Her interest in pursuing a career in medicine was seeded in that experience—and the stark contrast she saw when her family came to the U.S.

“I’ve always been interested in working with local communities here in America, so I thought the work in India would be a really good opportunity to explore that in a global context,” said Bhandari.

Dutra, too, has an international family background, with parents who immigrated from Brazil. “I grew up learning a lot about what their process was like coming to the U.S.,” she said. “I have a strong sense of the privilege I have being raised here.”

Among other things, Bhandari and Dutra helped researchers at JIPMER to compile field data related to biomarkers like ferritin and CRP—indicators of iron deficiency and inflammation—to better understand the link between undernutrition and immune system compromise. Part of their work included participating in home healthcare visits, meeting with study participants, and attending health screening camps called SLIM: Systemically Looking for Infections in the Malnourished. Their efforts began with organizing that field data and continues this fall during their studies on Grounds as additional data is collected and then analyzed.

The goal, Dutra explained, is to extrapolate the data to shape future interventions targeting undernourished communities at high risk for tuberculosis, thereby decreasing immune system compromise and preventing severe tuberculosis.

Both students expressed admiration for the initiative and the compassion of their JIPMER teammates, the majority of whom are from Pondicherry.

“You could really see the love and care that these workers on the ground have for the people and for the families that they’ve connected with,” said Dutra. “We talk a lot in global health about cultural respect and community integration, but seeing it so successful in practice really drove that home for me. Had the patients not trusted the healthcare workers, had they not felt respected, I don’t believe that we’d have had the same positive treatment adherence and treatment outcomes.”

The Ram Family Scholarship that supported this collaborative research project was life changing, she said, and also influential in terms of the way she thought about a future working in global health, which can be emotionally challenging.

“The necessity of these scholarships cannot be overemphasized because without them physicians or medical students may never have an opportunity to actually see what global health looks like firsthand,” she said.

For Bhandari, the scholarship provided a similarly eye-opening experience. “I feel like I got a broader view than I could have otherwise,” she said. “Like I was a frog taken up from a well and put in an ocean. I could see so many more perspectives.”

The Ram family’s gift that created the scholarship Bhandari and Dutra benefited from was just a starting point; the Ram family’s philanthropic work continues, and, as Anil K. Ram noted, the practice of karma yoga specifies the importance of selfless action and dedication to a higher purpose: “Karma Yoga Action is good if done without wanting anything in return,” he said.

In 2025, Anil K. Ram helped to pilot a new initiative with the Center for Global Health Equity to build upon the interdisciplinary expertise of UVA professors across Grounds. To do so, the center facilitated the work of Benjamin Goffin, a doctoral student in the School of Engineering working under the mentorship of Venkat Lakshmi, the John L. Newcomb Professor of Engineering. His research sought to determine the impact of air quality on tuberculosis transmission in regions like Pondicherry and across India using publicly available NASA satellite data to generate time-sequenced maps that can be tied to pollution, rainfall, crop production and other drivers of human movement and risk of airborne respiratory diseases. To do so, Goffin, Sinha, Heysell and Lakshmi partnered with the national tuberculosis program in India, working to map air quality changes over time for over 5 million people with tuberculosis.

“The expansion to involve interdisciplinary scientists to solve a model problem of tuberculosis benefits people in India, but the learning or methods can be applied in the U.S. where air quality drives other respiratory conditions. Investing in partnerships where we can measure a health benefit in a community over time allows us to develop research infrastructure competitive for other grants, and provides hands-on opportunities for our students,” summarized Heysell.

For more information on supporting UVA’s Center for Global Health Equity, please contact Carrie Jordan, Director of Development for International and Global Affairs, at cad4mn@virginia.edu.