Saravanan Thangarajan
Dr. Saravanan Thangarajan, MDS, MMSc, MBA is a global health leader who builds systems where equity and innovation meet. A Home Hospital International Fellow at Ariadne Labs and Visiting Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health / Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he bridges science, policy, and technology to expand access to quality care in low-resource settings. He advises on climate-health financing for the Wellcome Trust and serves on World Health Organization expert groups on dementia research and reproductive health in humanitarian settings. As a core member of the NSF–MITRE AI Working Group, he helps define national standards for responsible, human-centered AI in public health. Over the past decade, Dr. Thangarajan has led reforms bringing advanced, equitable care to communities often left behind. His research connects climate stressors; extreme heat, air pollution, and fragile social systems, to maternal mental health and caregiving burden, generating new evidence to guide resilience-based policy.
In India, he led Tele-MANAS, the national tele-mental-health platform managing over 690K calls and directed Tamil Nadu’s COVID-19 response for 7.8 million residents. In the U.S., he partnered with CalHHS and the California Department of Data and Innovation to integrate homelessness data and embed equity in state health planning. Globally, he has worked with Vietnam’s Ministry of Education, the World Bank, and WHO to embed climate and mental health into medical curricula and with UN Volunteers in Zimbabwe to co-create trauma-informed youth programs. Recipient of the Dean’s Scholar Award at Harvard Medical School, the Caswell A. Evans Award (APHA), and recognition at UN Climate Week, he has mobilized $6.6 million for equity-driven programs.
At Ariadne Labs, he is partnering with the Home Hospital team to advance home-hospital models merging digital innovation, data equity, and human-centered design, grounded in his belief that health systems must earn trust by meeting people where they live.