Sayantani DasGupta

Sayantani DasGupta (born 1970) is an American physician and author of Indian (Bengali) heritage.

Early life and education DasGupta grew up in Ohio and New Jersey and completed her undergraduate studies at Brown University. She obtained her M.D and MPH degrees from Johns Hopkins University.

Academia Originally trained in pediatrics and public health, Sayantani now teaches in the Master's Program in Narrative medicine at Columbia University and the Graduate Program in Health Advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a nationally recognized speaker on issues of gender, race, storytelling, and medical education, and has been featured on the cover of Ms., in O, The Oprah Magazine, in documentary films and other media outlets. She is an associate editor of the journal Literature and Medicine.

Publications

DasGupta has been published widely in academic and literary outlets, and journals including JAMA, The Lancet, Ms., Literary Mama Magazine, and Hunger Mountain. She has written extensively with her activist mother, Shamita Das DasGupta, on mother-daughter experiences.

She is the co-author of a book on Bengali folktales, author of a memoir about her education at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and co-editor of an award winning collection of women's illness narratives. Her debut middle-grade novel, The Serpent's Secret (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #1), came out in February 2018. Her second book, Game of Stars (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #2), published in February, 2019, entered the New York Times Bestseller list in its debut week.

Views In July 2025, DasGupta took part to the controversy over American Eagle Outfitters's "Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans" ad campaign. She stated on TikTok that the campaign, which made a pun on "jeans" and "genes" and featured blonde, blue-haired actress Sydney Sweeney, was "imbued with eugenic messaging" which had seen the "forced sterilization and decrease of reproduction among undesirable communities" and that it was "contributing to and reinforcing this kind of anti-immigrant, anti-people of colour, pro-eugenic, political moment". DasGupta's post became viral and contributed to the social media backlash against the ad.