Nientara Anderson, MD, MHS

Nientara Anderson grew up in Sri Lanka and immigrated to the U.S. in high school. She attended Yale College where she completed a BA in Fine Art. She then worked as an artist and arts writer, including as the arts editor of the Jackson Free Press (JFP), a progressive investigative journal in Jackson, MS. She was a founding director of the non-profit Bridge2Peace (B2P), based in Sri Lanka. Through her work managing medical and public health outreach for B2P, Nientara became interested in a career in medicine. She attended the Yale School of Medicine (YSM), where she was a founding member of both NextYSM––an activist group dedicated to advancing justice, equity, and inclusion at YSM––and of the Committee for Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (CDISJ). Nientara was also a co-founder of RebPsych, an annual conference on psychiatry and social justice. Her Masters research in History of Science and Medicine focused on the history of physician activism for racial justice and the racialization of student activism in the United States. Nientara was invited to deliver two endowed lectures on this research– –the Rand Lecture at the Yale School of Art and the Duffy Lecture at the Yale School of Medicine. As a medical student, she received the Robert Rock and Tehreem Rehman Student Activism Award and The Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed Award for leadership and commitment to the community at large. In 2022, her research on racial microaggressions in medical education received the honorable mention for the Lustman Award. Nientara is also interested in medical education and serves as her class elected representative on the Psychiatry department’s Graduate Education Committee (GEC) and Yale’s general Graduate Medical Education Committee (GMEC). She also co-leads "Making the Invisible Visible: Art, Identity, and Hierarchies of Power," a mandatory class on bias in medicine for MS1s at YSM. As a resident, she hopes to continue her activism and research on race and racism in medicine and psychiatry.