Dr. Anita Vasudevan entered college knowing she wanted to be a physician but found her passion for public health as a UT Austin peer health educator. Ultimately, she wants to be a family physician who is involved in community health and an advocate for health equity. Her exceptional dedication has led to three awards. Her next milestone is a residency in family medicine at Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital in California.

Dr. Anita Vasudevan

What the USPHS Award means: “Throughout medical school, it became increasingly clear to me that a healthy lifestyle begins outside of the doctor’s office. For me, this award validates that medicine and public health are not totally separate fields, and that being a good physician means more than just knowing which drug to prescribe.”

Mentor comment: “Anita is truly deserving of this award. She masterfully integrated her interests in community health and social justice with clinical training by successfully completing the M.D./M.P.H. dual degree with UTHealth School of Public Health in Dallas. She is a rising star and I am confident she will make a tremendous impact in improving primary care and population health in our nation.” – Dr. Bijal Balasubramanian, Associate Professor and Regional Dean at UTHealth School of Public Health in Dallas

What the Ross Award means: “I have admired the family medicine faculty since my first year of medical school, and they served as incredible mentors to me. I am so honored to receive this award from the people I’ve looked up to!”

Mentor comment: “Anita will graduate with an M.D./M.P.H. and also completed the CART (Community Action Research Track) Program. During the summer of 2017, Anita participated in the Community Health Fellowship Program and her research work, ‘Taxpayer Cost of Adolescent Childbearing in Dallas County, Texas,’ made a real impact for her partner organization NTARUPT. The next step in her community-based research was ‘Child Brides: Sociodemographic Factors, Health Variables, and Attitudes Associated with Marrying Before 18 Years Old in the United States’ during her three-month research Scholarly Activity. The final arm of research was done during the Community Medicine Elective and covered ‘Sociodemographic Factors and High-Risk Behaviors Associated With Child Marriage.’” – Dr. Nora Gimpel, Associate Professor of Family and Community Medicine and Vice Chair for Community Health

What the Endocrine Society Award means: “As a future primary care physician, I am interested in taking care of all patients, including those who identify as transgender, and I know this is something the Endocrine Society also values. I am very humbled to be selected for this honor.”

Mentor comment: “The faculty were very impressed with Anita’s performance on the Transgender Medicine elective. She asked excellent questions and was clearly very interested in learning. In addition, she has shown great initiative in a research study that she is spearheading to assess other students’ knowledge about transgender health care to help devise a curriculum.” – Dr. Jessica Abramowitz, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Associate Director of the Endocrinology and Metabolism Fellowship Program

Background and family: “I grew up in Missouri City, Texas, with my parents, older brother, and maternal grandmother. Growing up in a home with my grandmother shaped me immensely. She was born in a village in India in 1930, and she did not have the opportunity to stay in school for very long. Before my brother was born, she came to the United States to help my parents take care of him, and she ended up staying with us for the rest of her life. I think often about the kind of courage and love it would take to leave the only home you have ever known for an unfamiliar country in which you barely speak the language to help raise your grandchildren. I try to channel her bravery and strength when I am feeling anxious about the future, traveling somewhere new by myself, or speaking up about things that matter.”

What led to your career path: “In medical school, I spent my first summer doing the Community Health Fellowship Program through the Family and Community Medicine Department. I was so excited to find a specialty that focuses not only on the patient, but also on the social determinants of health and the community. During my family medicine clerkship, I loved how the residents and attendings had built such close and meaningful relationships with their patients, and I was sold on family medicine!”

College: “I graduated from UT Austin in 2016 with a Bachelor of Science in biology honors. I was involved in biochemistry research that focused on identifying inhibitors for enzymes involved in causing infectious disease. On the public health side, I was involved in my school’s peer health educator program, where I got to promote healthy living on campus.”

UTSW activities: “I have been a part of United to Serve since the first year of medical school and a Chair on the Prizes & Donations Committee for the last three years. I am also an officer for our Family Medicine Interest Group, and I have helped plan workshops, created a podcast about being a family physician, and managed our social media accounts. I also started my own organization, the Southwestern Alliance Against Food Insecurity (SAAFI), that volunteers with organizations around the community.”

Surprising fact: “My fiancé and I actually grew up in the same neighborhood, so we have known each other since we were about 8 years old!”

Future plans: “I want to be a full-spectrum family physician who also continues to be involved in community health. I would love to work for a federally qualified health center or in a similar setting because working toward health equity is so important to me. I hope to also do health equity and advocacy work at a systems level.”

About the awards: 

Administered by the U.S. Public Health Service Physician Professional Advisory Committee, the Excellence in Public Health Award recognizes medical students who have positively impacted public health in their communities. The Ross Award, named after the Chair of Family and Community Medicine at UT Southwestern from 1984 to 1993, includes a $1,000 scholarship from the Dallas Chapter of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians Foundation. The Endocrine Society Award is bestowed upon a medical student who has done significant research in endocrinology.