Anita Chandra

Biography

Anita Chandra is a behavioral scientist and manager of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Group at the RAND Corporation, as well as a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her background is in public health, child and adolescent health, and community-based participatory research and evaluation. She currently leads or co-leads studies on deployment and military families; community resilience and long-term disaster recovery; and child health and well-being. Throughout her career, Chandra has engaged community partners to consider cross-sector solutions for improving child well-being and to build evaluation capacity among community-based organizations. In this capacity, she led a community-wide pediatric needs assessment in Washington, D.C., and a school health program study in D.C. focused on the integration of health and education. She has been involved in the national evaluation of the Safe Start program for children exposed to violence, projects with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to examine community capacity in public health preparedness, and an intervention study on teen depression in primary care settings. Chandra has engaged community members, particularly young people, in program evaluation and in the translation and dissemination of research findings into community action. She develops projects in adolescent mental health to explore stigma as a barrier to mental health care-seeking and to understand issues of emotional wellness. She also conducted projects in sexual and reproductive health, such as monitoring and evaluation at reproductive health clinics and designing a provider toolkit on barriers to appropriate reproductive health services for teens. Chandra received her Dr.P.H. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.