Lasya Kandukuri is an honors graduate of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, where she earned a BS in neuroscience, with minors in chemistry and creative writing. Having completed over 300 hours of emergency medical technician training, she is EMT certified in the state of North Carolina. As a research assistant with UNC Neurology’s Dementia with Lewy Bodies Consortium, she has managed large public health datasets, contributing to novel research in understanding symptom progression within the disease, and presented at both the 2026 Celebration of Undergraduate Research at UNC as well as the 4th Annual Symposium for Learning about Alzheimer’s disease-related Medical Research at Duke and UNC (SLAM-DUNC). She has also accumulated over 900 hours as a healthcare provider through her work as an EMT, as an overnight caretaker through CareYaya, and as an intern at Jaipur’s Aarogyam Hospital and its affiliated slum clinic. As the president of the Union County EMS Explorers Program in 2021, Lasya mentored peers interested in emergency medicine through educational workshops and ambulance ride-alongs. Further, as the president of UNC MEDLIFE from 2023 to 2025, she led volunteer initiatives with students and hosted fundraising campaigns for medical aid and education in underserved communities. As a recipient of the 2024 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, she completed an eight-week intensive Hindi program at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where she achieved near-native fluency in the language. Her clinical, research, and leadership experiences have equipped her to navigate complex team dynamics, manage multifaceted projects, and practice collaboration with empathy in service-oriented work. In the long term, she sees herself as a researcher and professor who encourages student inquiry into global health systems, advances accessibility in emergency care, and amplifies the voices of those in need.
Lasya’s Fulbright-Nehru research is investigating how geography and socioeconomic factors impact 108 Ambulance Service response times and thus patient outcomes across urban and peri-urban regions of Jaipur. In collaboration with IIHMR’s Dr. Seema Mehta, she is using multivariable regression and GIS mapping on anonymized EMS datasets to identify predictors of delays, along with a deprivation index constructed from census indicators to capture socioeconomic variation. She is also conducting interviews with first responders, hospital providers, researchers, and policy experts to gather insights into potential strategies for intervention, and analyzing patterns in order to minimize delays and mortality rates.