Anjali Chandra, Class of 2018, concentrated in Cognitive Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology and received a certificate in Spanish.
While at the college she was an active part of Harvard Dharma, the Hindu students group, Harvard Development Think Tank and the Harvard College Rural Health Association. As outreach chair for Dharma, she helped organize a program called Face to Faith, funded by the Undergraduate Council, where different campus faith communities could interact through interfaith panel discussions, visiting each other's places of worship, and participating in joint service projects. She served as co-President from 2017 to 2018, where she helped build Dharma's alumni network, and fostered discussions around diversity and inclusion. As co-Director of the Development Think Tank, Anjali was able to engage with community and global health issues from a user perspective, as the group sought to use human centered design thinking to help non-profits and social enterprises optimize their impact. During her sophomore year, Anjali organized an Impact Design Challenge open to all students at the college, where teams of 3 to 4 students designed devices to address nutritional and water sanitation issues in Villa del Amor, Mexico.
Anjali joined the Rural Health Association in early 2017 as Service Director and later served as co-President for the 2017-2018 school year. She organized a service trip to rural Tennessee and Georgia to host free health clinics and organize health fairs for underserved communities. During the summer of 2017, she also received the Hanzich Fellowship to conduct the Appalachian Prenatal Health Initiative, a series of workshops on prenatal care and substance use during pregnancy.
While in college, Anjali continued to grow programs through her non-profit which she started in middle school, by expanding obesity prevention programs in her city to nine different schools, and starting a gardening initiative for low-income areas designated as food deserts.
This year, Anjali will be completing a Master's in Public Health with a specialization in Leadership and Practice through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She will also be working with her City's Office of Multi-cultural affairs to address cultural barriers to healthcare.