Vice President and Director, RAND Social and Economic Well-Being; Senior Policy Researcher; Professor of Policy Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School
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Anita Chandra (she/her) is vice president and director of RAND Social and Economic Well-Being and a senior policy researcher at RAND. The division that she leads covers a range of topics at the intersection of social and economic policy and the organization of the economy, the environment, and social and physical infrastructure. The division also manages RAND Centers on climate, racial and social equity, housing, drug policy, policing, and civil justice, and coleads a new initiative on economics and national security. As a researcher, Chandra leads studies on health and health equity; civic well-being and community planning; disaster response and resilience; public health emergency preparedness; child health and development; and effects of military deployment on families.
Throughout her career, Chandra has engaged government and nongovernmental partners to employ cross-sector solutions to improve community well-being and to build more robust systems, implementation, and evaluation capacity. This involves work with federal and local government agencies on building systems for emergency preparedness and resilience both in the United States and globally as well as partnering with the private sector and government to modernize data systems and measure environmental sustainability, well-being, and civic transformation. Chandra has conducted broad-scale health and environmental needs assessments to examine the integration of health and human service systems, and to determine how to integrate equity and address the needs of historically underrepresented populations in human service systems. She earned a Dr.P.H. in population and family health sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr.P.H. in population and family health sciences, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; M.P.H. in maternal and child health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health; B.A. in child development, Tufts University
