“There is an art to medicine,” says Nanditha Niranjan, a pre-med senior majoring in Healthcare Studies at UT Dallas’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies. This is one of many phrases Nanditha will drop during our conversation that, alongside her self-possessed demeanor, gives the impression she is older than her years.
A Dallas-area native who chose UTD partly to stay close to home, Nanditha grew up in the same house for 21 years. As we talk, I begin to understand how her commitment to family and community have shaped her.
“I’ve grown up in a very service-oriented environment,” she explains. “I wanted to work in a place where I could be constantly serving.” She talks about “growing up and seeing different figures in medicine and observing the impact they had not just in their clinics but in their communities.” She adds: “You see a doctor as a community leader.” In high school, Nanditha began to volunteer shadowing medical professionals and, as a result, to seriously consider medicine as a career.
She didn’t know it was the right fit, though, until after entering UTD – an easy choice for Nanditha when she “saw how welcoming the community was and how much they want their students to succeed,” she says, but adds: “What really drew me to UTD was all the ubiquitous resources that it has, especially for re-meds.” She notes how many friends she’s seen enter the university and “come out with a lot more clarity about where they want to go in the future.” Looking back, Nanditha doesn’t regret her decision. “I think UTD was a really good choice for me.”
“You see a doctor as a community leader.”
Nanditha niranjan
Nanditha’s next step was choosing a major. This was more complicated, since many different programs can form a path to medical school. In the end, she chose Healthcare Studies for what she calls “a holistic view on healthcare and how you can not only work with medicine to help people get the medicine they deserve, but how you can get more accessibility into healthcare. No one really talks about that.” It was this focus on the healthcare system and the patients it serves, rather than merely the biological sciences, that drew Nanditha.
“For Healthcare Studies, something that’s really beautiful is the focus on public health,” she says. “My mentor Dr. Stark showed me how there is an art to medicine, and that is public health. You have to pivot medicine on public health in order to help people as holistically and as deeply as possible because the person you’re treating is not just a list of numbers. They have so many things around them that affect their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing and it’s so important to learn that before you try to help them.”
It’s this holistic view of healthcare that, for Nanditha, makes the Healthcare Studies program the perfect pre-med track for her. “In my public health courses, we talk about the social determinants of health all the time,” she explains. “It’s really a nice refresher apart from my core science courses, which I love.” (Her minor is neurobiology.) “But also,” she adds, “you need some peripheral attempt to understand how you can get medicine to people in the first place.”
Although Nanditha clearly has a predilection towards service, she credits Assistant Professor of Instruction Azadeh Stark with inspiring not only her passion for public health, but her ability to take herself seriously. “I’ve learned so much from her,” says Nanditha. “Dr. Stark looks at you not just as a student but as a public health professional. And that’s the way she conducts her classes. Her standards and her ethics are so high, and it’s inspiring. I love the amount of integrity and drive she puts in her students. That has been something that I’ve always taken away from her and what’s made me stay in Healthcare Studies and pursue this.”
The “this” she’s pursuing is Upstream United, a non-profit organization Nanditha co-founded with UTD Healthcare Studies alumna Shriya Veluri. “We saw a statistic from the World Health Organization,” Nanditha explains, “that said 12% of Americans are considered health literate.” Hearing this intensified her concern about the health literacy of refugees, a population she was already working with as an English tutor. “I went to different refugees’ homes, and we had very in-person, intimate environments where we kind of became family… And when you’re family, you want to help them out in whatever way possible.”
Nanditha was in an unusual situation: growing close to refugee families while simultaneously pursuing a public-health-informed education, and realizing, “They’re such a vulnerable population, because how can they navigate a healthcare system that they never grew up in and that they have limited help for?” Luckily, she felt her program of study was giving her the tools and confidence to make a difference. “Being in Healthcare Studies,” says Nanditha, “one thing I realized is how beautiful the application part of it is. A lot of my professors – they give you the space to figure out how you can apply what you’re learning in class outside, in your community. That’s what led me to start Upstream United.”
Nanditha explains: “Something that was in my first Healthcare Studies class – shout-out Dr. Stark – is we talked about what ‘upstream’ means. Healthcare is a downstream method. We try to prescribe more, or add more things to a patient’s history, so they are neither ‘sick’ nor ‘healthy’ in our healthcare system. So, what we try to do for these refugees is implement an upstream method of care, which is teaching them how to take care of their health in the future, so they can not only survive in their environment, but thrive. That is the basis of Upstream United.”
“There is an art to medicine, and that is public health. You have to pivot medicine on public health in order to help people as holistically and as deeply as possible.”
nanditha niranjan
With their non-profit, Nanditha and Shriya have been able to conduct health literacy workshops to educate recently resettled refugees about taking care of their own health and navigating the healthcare system. “We’ve been lucky to work in a few cities at this point, and we’re expanding in a couple months outside of Texas. It’s an initiative that has taken a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but it starts with the seed of what we’ve learned in our classes and how we want to implement it in our world.”
Upstream United is fundamentally interdisciplinary in scope and collaborative in methodology. “We’ve been able to develop cross-institutional collaborations, which means we work not only with some medical schools around Texas but with resettlement agencies. That is a really good way to connect with these refugees, because they not only have a record of their experiences and current living situation, but we’re able to directly intervene where they need help the most.” And the health care community is taking notice: in 2023, Nanditha and Shriya delivered a platform presentation at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting and Expo in Atlanta, Georgia.
Nanditha is still a student, albeit one with a markedly clear sense of her mission and her place in the world. She doesn’t yet know what type of medicine she wants to practice. “Medicine is very experiential,” she explains. “I need to be able to have some more experiences and suss that out.”
Meanwhile, Nanditha will complete her final year at UTD continuing to serve as Vice President for the student organization Molding Doctors, applying to medical schools, and building Upstream United into a public health organization of note. Though she deftly quotes statistics about the “social determinants of health,” and is clearly comfortable with hard data and hard science, Nanditha has the heart of a healer. It’s when she talks about “how many people are struggling” that passion enters her eyes and voice, and it’s the recognition of the human beings within the system that makes Healthcare Studies the right degree for her.
“It opens your eyes to the scars that we have the ability to heal in people’s lives.”
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Here is a video of my interview with Nanditha.
Find out more about the Healthcare Studies program.
Connect with Nanditha on LinkedIn.
Follow the School of Interdisciplinary Studies on Instagram and LinkedIn.