Anita Chandra, Ph.D.

Anita Chandra, Ph.D., is a behavioral scientist and manager of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Group at the RAND Corporation. Her background is in public health, child and adolescent health and community-based participatory research and evaluation. She has led efforts to evaluate the state of child health in Washington, D.C. to assess its school health program and examine the impact of deployment on children from military families. She also leads efforts to examine issues of community resilience and long-term disaster recovery. 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 that examine community capacity to build systems of 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 health communication products. She develops projects in the area of adolescent mental health to explore youth perceptions of mental health, examine stigma as a barrier to mental health care-seeking and understand mental health issues for youths of color living in urban communities. She has been invested in adolescent reproductive health, conducting monitoring and evaluation activities at reproductive health clinics and designing a toolkit for health care providers on cultural and developmental barriers to appropriate reproductive health services for teens. Chandra received her doctorate in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.