Siddhesh Zadey is a Senior Research Aide in the Department of Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine (DU-SOM) and a Co-founding Director of non-profit research and advocacy, Association for Socially Applicable Research (ASAR). He completed a Bachelor of Science Master of Science (BSMS) dual degree program at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune in 2018. For his Master’s thesis, he worked at Harvard Medical School with Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone on non-invasive brain stimulation markers for cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease. He completed a second Master’s from the Duke Global Health Institute in 2021, working with Dr. Joao Vissoci on mapping surgical care access in rural India.

At ASAR, he focuses on systems modeling to investigate socioeconomic disparities, healthcare access, and population-level mental health problems. At Emergency Medicine Division, DU-SOM, he co-leads the Bass Connections Team with Drs. Catherine Staton and Joao Vissoci investigating cultural variations in alcohol use behaviors. He also works with Dr. Tamara Fitzgerald, Division of Pediatric Surgery, DU-SOM on improving access to gasless laparoscopy in low-income countries.

He is a member of the ‘Indian Academy of Pediatrics COVID-19 Task Force for School Reopening’ in 2021, and is currently a Fellow for the Lancet Citizens’ Commission on ‘Reimagining India’s Health System’ working with the Human Resources Workstream. He is a part of the Global Burden of Disease Collaborators Network, Mental Health Innovation Network, Global Mental Health Action Network, and the Global Alliance for Surgical, Obstetric, Trauma and Anaesthesia Care (G4 Alliance). I was recently awarded the prestigious Consortium of Universities for Global Health’s Dr. Judy Wasserheit Young Leader Award (under 30) for 2022. While he is researcher by training, he is a poet and writer at heart. Since childhood, his mother exposed him to poetry in Marathi, Hindi, and English along with translations from several other languages – leading to composing my first quatrain at 5.

His first anthology of Marathi poems, ‘Thode Nabhatun Thode Sareetun’ was published by Akanksha Prakshan (Nagpur) in 2014. His Hindi poems,’Samundar’ and ‘Hasrat’ have been competitively selected and published in the Journal of Poetry Society India (New Delhi, 2016). He currently looking for publishers for his philosophical fiction, ‘The Drone Story.’

Read more about Siddhesh Zadey on NYC Daily Post.