Anjana Sharma, MD, MAS
Principal Investigator
Anjana is a practicing family physician at the San Francisco General Hospital and a researcher at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Her research includes topics such as: patient experiences on social media, patient safety in primary care, and how to engage patients and community partners in research and clinical care. She was motivated to develop the CAROM study because of her own observations of misinformation being passed around among family and friends.
https://profiles.ucsf.edu/
Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH
Principal Investigator
Urmimala Sarkar MD, MPH is Professor of Medicine at UCSF in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Associate Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, Associate Chair for Faculty Experience for the Department of Medicine, and a primary care physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital’s Richard H. Fine People's Clinic.
Dr. Sarkar’s work centers on innovating for health equity and improving safety and quality of outpatient care for everyone, especially low-income and diverse populations. Some of her interests include: social media and behavior change, digital health, and patient safety. Dr. Sarkar’s research is collaborative and intersects with methods found in human-centered design, human factors engineering, data science, health services research, and implementation science.
Dr. Sarkar remembers when keeping in touch with relatives in India meant unreliable phone connections and blue aerograms sent through the mail. She appreciates how quickly information spreads via social media and messaging platforms today, and hopes that studies like CAROM help accurate information gain traction.
Arnab Mukherjea, DrPH, MPH
Co-Investigator
Dr. Arnab Mukherjea is an Associate Professor and Incoming Chair of the Department of Health Sciences at California State University, East Bay. In addition, he serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Resource Centers on Minority Aging Research (RCMAR) of the National Institute on Aging. In his research, he utilizes community-engaged research methods to determine, understand, and address health disparities experienced among Asian and Pacific Islander (API) subgroups. For example, he has studied facilitators and barriers for colorectal cancer screening among diverse South Asian subgroups in Northern California, and translation of findings into effective interventions. Arnab firmly believes that community participation is essential for affected groups to understand, address, and ultimately take ownership of their own individual and collective health prospects.
Arnab understands how difficult the pandemic has been for his family and other South Asians in terms of inability to gather with family, including his parents not being able to play carom with their grandkids, not attend religious and cultural events, and being isolated from the larger community. He wants to make sure that misconceptions and incorrect information being spread is identified and corrected, so that the community can gather together again safely and comfortably.
Kiran Khosla, BA
Research Assistant
Kiran is a Boston College graduate with a degree in Environmental Studies and a concentration in global public health. She has worked for the environmental health non-profit madesafe.org and as an environmental consultant. She has often felt that her lived experiences are not reflected in research through the catch-all Asian category, which especially became apparent from the lack of COVID health outcomes studies that use granular ethnic data. This is one reason why the CAROM study excites her; it is an opportunity to work with a meticulous and innovative team to impact our community through research. She plans to attend graduate school to develop skills in science communication, design thinking, and mixed-methods to study health disparities. She also plans to bring a carom game board with her.
Kameswari "Kamu" Potharaju
Research Assistant
Kamu is a graduating senior at UC Berkeley studying public health with a minor in Global Poverty & Practice. She is deeply interested in the intersections of community-based health disparities research, human-centered design, health technology, and clinical medicine. A native of Fremont, CA, which is home to a thriving South Asian population, Kamu is an active member of the UC Berkeley South Asian community and also spent a summer in Mumbai, India, researching maternal and child health in slum settlements at a major nonprofit. The CAROM study is an exciting opportunity for her to connect her South Asian identity with her academic interests, and she is thrilled to be working with this fantastic team to address the pressing issue of misinformation about COVID-19 in the South Asian diaspora!
