Ms. Siddhi Deshpande is a graduate of The Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College, where she majored in Neurobiology with minors in Global Health and World Literature. In her time at Penn State, she pursued a variety of interests in public health and medicine. She completed an honors thesis in the Water, Health, and Nutrition lab, titled “Examining Water Insecurity as a Driver of Nutrition Transition Among Tsimane’ Adults in Lowland Bolivia”. Through this thesis, she found that water insecurity was associated with increased consumption of sugary beverages among Tsimane’ in Amazonion Bolivia. Furthermore, the level of market integration also played a role in probability of sugary beverage consumption. Her research in water insecurity, nutrition, and health in a global health setting sparked her interest in conducting similar research in India, which is the reason she applied to the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship! Besides her research, Ms. Deshpande also took a broader interest in environmental health. She co-founded and co-led an organization called Sunrise Movement State College, where she worked with her community to organize local climate demonstrations, advocated for climate justice measures, and campaigned for divestment from the fossil fuel industry. She believes that community-wide advocacy and the will to confront the reality of climate change will help achieve climate justice in our communities.
After completion of the Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Deshpande plans to attend medical school and attain a dual MD/MPH degree. In university, Ms. Deshpande worked as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), where she treated 100+ patients on a 911 ambulance service. Enjoying the work of treating patients but also hoping to serve her community on a larger scale, Ms. Deshpande hopes to combine an education in medicine and public health to serve as a physician who advocates for her community and works towards climate justice. She envisions herself conducting environmental health research and influencing policy alongside her responsibilities in clinical medicine.
In India, growing rates of obesity, insulin resistance and cardiometabolic disease are present alongside malnutrition and hunger across India. Climate change has been understudied in connection to this nutrition transition, despite increased drought across India and a rapid demographic change as a result. Food insecurity is an important mechanism of the consequent public health impacts; Ms. Deshpande plans to investigate how declining agricultural productivity, driven by climate change, causes nutrition transition from undernutrition to obesity among the rural poor. Ms. Deshpande is studying under Dr. Angeline Jeyakumar at Savitraibai Phule Pune University, where she is conducting research in Pune and Latur.