Shruti Sagar received her BA in community health from Tufts University. During her time at Tufts, she evaluated a water infrastructure intervention in Haiti, taught health education to high school students through Peer Health Exchange, and facilitated qualitative fieldwork for local health departments and nonprofits about emerging public health issues.
After graduation, she worked full time at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center in Boston, MA, where she contributed to several NIH-funded cohort studies and randomized controlled trials, including one study exploring the association between air pollution and lung function among people living with HIV in Uganda, and another study on the delivery of PrEP and contraceptives to women in hair salons in South Africa. She is a co-author on multiple peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Annals of the American Thoracic Society, BMC Public Health, and Annals of Internal Medicine.
After her time at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center, Shruti attended the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to complete her MPH. In addition to her research, Shruti served as a teaching assistant for MPH courses on epidemiology, implementation science, and program evaluation.
Shruti’s Fulbright-Nehru research is examining intracity disparities in air pollution exposure in Delhi. She is conducting a spatial analysis to identify and visualize geographic disparities in air pollution exposure and sociodemographic vulnerability, and is supplementing her findings with qualitative fieldwork to explore community perceptions of air pollution risk. In order to inform resource allocation and policy development, Shruti’s project is identifying the geographic areas in Delhi that are the most vulnerable to the impacts of air pollution exposure.