Monica Gandhi

Monica Gandhi is an American physician and professor. She teaches medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and is director of the UCSF Gladstone Center for AIDS Research and the medical director of the San Francisco General Hospital HIV Clinic, Ward 86. Her research considers HIV prevalence in women, as well as HIV treatment and prevention. She has been noted as a critic of some aspects of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the US.

Early life and education Gandhi was born to Indian American immigrant parents. Her father, Om P. Gandhi, was a professor of Electrical Engineering and former department chair at the University of Utah. Her father returned to his home country of India to teach physics after he earned his doctoral degree at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. He returned to the United States in 1967, with his wife Santosh, who would work as a computer scientist at 3M. While an undergraduate, she worked in the laboratory of John S. Parkinson, where she studied the flagellar motor switch proteins in Escherichia coli. She earned a Master's in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, with a focus on epidemiology and biostatistics. and investigated sex differences in the management of HIV/AIDS. In 2017, she opened a geriatric clinic at the San Francisco General Hospital HIV Clinic, Ward 86.

COVID-19 Gandhi has criticized certain aspects of COVID-19 lockdowns, especially those imposed in the San Francisco Bay area, for being blunt measures lacking in concern for individual behavioral choices, desire to be with people, and their effect on outpatient care and mental health; she has expressed her concerns in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other media outlets, but her views go against a majority of domain-experts. She has been a consistent advocate against closing of schools throughout the pandemic especially with the availability of effective vaccines. She also established a mentoring workshop series for HIV investigators across the United States, Peru, and South Africa. In 2019, Gandhi delivered the convocation speech at the University of Utah.

Personal life

Gandhi was married to Rakesh Mishra, Professor of Medicine at UCSF, until his death in November 2019. They have two children.

Awards and honours 2012 Sarlo Award for Teaching Excellence 2013 UCSF John L. Ziegler Outstanding Mentoring Award 2017 HIV Medical Association Clinical Educator Award 2019 UCSF Lifetime Merit Award 2020 co-chair of AIDS 2020 2021 - San Mateo County declared June 15 Monica Gandhi Day

Selected publications