Anita Chandra

Anita Chandra (Dr.P.H., Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; M.P.H., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a Director of the Justice, Infrastructure and Environment division at the RAND Corporation, as well as a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her background is in public health, child and adolescent development, and community-based participatory research and program evaluation. She currently leads or co-leads studies on community resilience and long-term disaster recovery; deployment and military families; and child health and well-being. She serves as the RAND Principal Investigator of the multi-year Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience project, an effort to implement and evaluate community resilience-building strategies with particular focus on strengthening linkages between government and nongovernmental organizations and leveraging community assets for disaster resilience. The Los Angeles work has now extended to the District of Columbia, where she is leading a similar effort entitled Resilient DC. Dr. Chandra's work also included initiatives in the Gulf South, including a study of disaster case management and development of a community resilience training module for community organizations, which features the benefits of sustainable development as part of overall community resilience. She has also led or co-led several studies in public health systems research with attention to addressing the needs of historically vulnerable populations.