Ashri Anurudran

Ashri Anurudran

Harvard Medical School
ashri anurudran

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence | Denver, CO

 

Ashri Anurudran graduated from Harvard College in 2019 with a degree in Economics and a minor in Global Health and completed a MPhil in Public Health at the University of Cambridge in 2020.

 

Growing up in England, Malaysia, and the United States, as a child of Sri Lankan immigrants, Ashri has always been drawn to working in global health settings and supporting marginalized communities. As a woman of color, she has been specifically interested in the intersection of gender, violence, and health across contexts. Over the past six years, she has led public health projects on gender-based violence prevention in Kenya, India, and the United States. In 2016, in partnership with the Kisumu Medical Education Trust, she founded Empower to Eliminate, a sexual violence prevention program for 12 to 14-year-olds in Kenya, which has trained over 2000 students in 10 primary schools. In 2019, Ashri ran a randomized control trial of 1200 students to evaluate the program's effectiveness. In 2020, in response to the pandemic, Ashri launched the COVID-19 Task Force on Domestic Violence, a nonprofit, to investigate, educate, and advocate on behalf of survivors of domestic violence.

 

Through these experiences, Ashri has understood the importance of focusing on individual stories of survivors while also acknowledging that the patterns of interpersonal violence are influenced by broader social forces, such as economic hardship, housing instability, food insecurity, discrimination, and immigration status. In partnership with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the COVID-19 Task Force on Domestic Violence, Ashri hopes to create the Scholarship Fund for Survivors of Interpersonal Violence to empower survivors with financial resources for education, individualized mentorship, and a close-knit community of scholars.

Fellowship Recipients