Sandhira Wijayaratne

I am the proud son of Sri Lankan immigrantswho settled in northern New Jersey, where I grew up. Attending Johns Hopkins University for college, I studied Public Health and Sociology, which became the foundation for my interest in the intersection of psychosocial health and HIV. Humbled by community health opportunities in Baltimore, Boston, Kenya, and Ethiopia, I found myself valuing the time I spent learning from the communities I worked with. Wanting to further align myself through community work after graduating from Hopkins, I spent an amazing year teaching English in Phitsanulok, Thailand. Afterward, I aimed to get further experience in the various arenas of community and global health work—at a global health communications firm, with a research team studying the cost-effectiveness of different HIV community interventions, at an HIV policy organization, and with a community-based organization in rural India. I earned my MD at Harvard Medical School, where I found psychiatry to be a strong blend of cultural and clinical humility, empathic listening, and social justice work. I am excited for psychiatry residency at Yale, which provides an enriching atmosphere to pursue my interests in community psychiatry, cultural psychiatry, addiction, and global mental health. Outside of medicine, I take many walks with my wife, son, and dog, cook, read, watch movies, and root for Kansas City football.