Kiran Kumbhar ([email protected])

Kiran Kumbhar is a physician and public health expert currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was previously the Dr Malathy Singh Lecturer and postdoctoral associate at the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. He graduated with a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University in 2022. His PhD dissertation examined the history of people’s trust in (biomedical) doctors in India in the post-independence period, attempting to explore the social and political aspects of public skepticism and anger against doctors in recent decades.

He studied medicine at Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Medical College, Pune (2010), and health policy at Harvard Chan School of Public Health (2015). At Harvard University, he was awarded the Government of India Amartya Sen Fellowship for the year 2016-17.

He has practised medicine and worked as a Medical Officer in public and private hospitals, including a District Hospital in Maharashtra and a government hospital in Delhi. As a public health expert he has primarily worked in public outreach and communication, regularly writing for the general public on topics like universal healthcare, inequities in healthcare access, and medical education reform. In recent years, he has also written on the history of medicine and healthcare, modern Indian history, contemporary politics, casteism in medicine and healthcare, and the COVID-19 pandemic. He has been published in the Times of India, Wire, Scroll, Huffington Post, and The Swaddle among others.