A doctor and medical anthropologist, Sandesara works as a clinician, researcher and professor at UCLA. As of July, he became academic chair of the International Institute's global health program, where he has been a faculty member since 2023.

UCLA International Institute, August 24, 2026 — Utpal Sandesara, M.D., Ph.D., joined the faculty of the International Institute’s global health minor in 2023. In July, he became chair of the program, which is the second-largest undergraduate minor offered by the UCLA College of Letters and Science (with 339 enrolled students in spring 2026).

That same month, Sandesara became a member of the international honor society of science and engineering, Sigma Xi. Being invited to become a member of one of the oldest and largest scientific organizations in the world signals serious peer recognition. “I feel particularly honored to have been recognized while still an early-career scholar,” he said of his induction.

Since joining the institute’s global health faculty, Sandesara has created three electives for the program: GBL HLT 130: Critical Global Health: Cases and Concepts; GBL HLT 191: Envisioning Post-2025 Futures for Global Health; and GBL HLT 191: Reproduction and Power.

He taught Envisioning Post-2025 Futures for Global Health, which addresses the impact on global health of the 2025 cuts to U.S. foreign aid, for the first time last spring. Sandesara and his students divvied up the work of reading and reporting on the bilateral memoranda of understanding that the U.S. State Department was/is negotiating with various former aid recipient countries. They also did assigned research on specific diseases.

“Whether it was malaria or world hunger or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, we would teach each other about what the impacts of the cuts had been.” He will teach the course again in spring 2027.

Neelam279 via Pixabay. 

In order to create a community where students can respectfully discuss difficult topics and disagree, Sandesara increasingly encourages students who can do so to forego using phones and laptops in the classroom — as well as to commit to not using AI tools. In fact, he specifies when they should bring devices to class in order to research something online together in real time.

“I say to them, ‘This is a class where you learn to process ideas by being present and engaging through real dialogue with me and, just as importantly, or maybe more importantly, your peers. For that, the evidence shows we get better engagement if we put away devices,’” he said.

At the end of his spring 2026 course, he shared, “I would probably have needed two hands to count the number of students who came up to me in the last week of classes and said, ‘Thank you for forcing us to be in a technology-minimal class; this is the least technology I’ve used in a class in college.’

“It enhanced the experience because they actually got to know their peers. By the end of the class, people were running into each other at events and striking up friendly conversations.”

Sustaining the excellence of UCLA’s second-largest minor

“The global health minor is very ecumenical,” commented Sandesara. “We draw people who are majoring in everything from lab sciences to humanities to social sciences.”

“[Since 2015], the International Institute’s leadership, faculty, students and our advising staff have built a really vibrant minor, ” said Sandesara. “I want to keep the diversity and richness of the program — because the students are excited to be in it. I’d like to continue to build our course offerings and sustain the excellence.

“I’d also like to continue building bridges that connect our undergrad students with the other global health things happening on campus, especially at the medical school.”

The minor requires two lower division and five upper division courses, including the required GLB HLT 100: Global Health and Development that was developed and is regularly taught by psychiatrist and medical anthropologist Ippolytos Kalofonos, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., who recently stepped down as program chair.

The interdisciplinary program enables students to take global health–related courses in departments and professional schools across campus. Impressive global health faculty and researchers at UCLA also teach courses specifically created for the minor, including pediatrician Miho Sodeno, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., who has worked at both the Japanese Institute for Health Security and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency; neonatologist Sadath Sayeed, M.D., J.D., director of the Global Health Program of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; demographer Victor Agadjanian, who studies topics in global health and migration worldwide; and medical anthropologist Agatha Palma, who works for the Veterans Affairs Administration in Los Angeles.

In addition to academic courses, the program also offers popular for-credit summer internships in La Paz, Bolivia and Oaxaca, Mexico and a summer travel study program in Australia (Sydney and other locales).

Using a collaborative approach to teaching and research

“Every Tuesday, I’m a primary care physician, just like all the other primary care physicians in my clinic, and I see my patients,” said Sandesara, who works as a primary care doctor at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, a public safety-net hospital operated by LA County Health Services.

“The other 80% of the time, I get to teach in our global health program, teach at the medical school and do research,” he said. His research explores lived experiences of bodily suffering, structural inequality, and how patients, family, caregivers and communities understand clinical diagnoses and treatment regimens.

His first monograph, “She is Not Ours,” is currently under review by a publisher. The book explores the experiences of Indian couples opting for sex-selective abortions despite their illegality. It finds that people feel trapped by larger social forces and are undeterred by moralistic campaigns. Sandesara previously co-authored an ethno-history of the 1979 Machhu dam disaster in India, “No One Had a Tongue to Speak” (Prometheus, 2011), a project that grew out of an undergraduate elective.

The UCLA scholar also writes regularly for peer-reviewed medical journals and publishes more public-facing articles and opinion pieces in newspapers and online publications. A recent article published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in June 2026 was authored by a multidisciplinary team led by Sandesara and reviews existing qualitative research on resident physicians’ work-related emotional experiences.

“The biggest finding is that medical residents’ work-related emotions emerge not simply from the strenuous demands of work, but from how those demands interact with identity and values,” he explained. “This has implications for how we try to reduce ‘burnout’ among residents. That is, we need structural reform, not just a reduction in total hours worked or individualizing/psychologizing interventions like mindfulness classes.”

Sandesara also recently teamed with Stephanie Young, clinical psychologist in the department of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, to develop a toolkit and teach workshops on “Addressing Challenging Personality Traits in Internal Medicine Practice (ACPT-IMP).” The workshop won the Society for General Internal Medicine’s 2025 Rogers Junior Faculty Award for Outstanding Workshop; the co-creators have also presented it as a keynote session at a regional conference.

In short, both the toolkit and workshop aim to help medical professionals interact with the “difficult patient,” a phrase Sandesara does not like, but said is very prevalent in medical literature.

“This is a very different kind of workshop in that only half of the strategies that we present are external or patient-facing; the other half are internal or self-facing,” he explained. “How do I take these negative emotions that naturally arise from being cursed at, or having a patient poo-poo my recommendations, understand them for what they are, and find a way to build a therapeutic alliance with the patient?

“It’s the beginning of a practice of self-reflection and self-redirection that we know from our own clinical experiences does lead to more rewarding and more productive interactions with patients over time.”

Jhan Castillón via Unsplash.

At present, the UCLA professor is involved in two clinical research projects. “First, I’m one part of a massive team — nurses, physicians, health educators, social workers, research facilitators and researchers across both UCLA and Los Angeles County — working on a community-engaged project to make standard ‘evidence-based practices’ for hypertension management relevant, exciting and effective for diverse safety-net patients,” he said.

In another collaborative project with the local community and medical professionals at LA County Health Services, Sandesara is leading a longitudinal, home-based ethnographic study of informal caregiving for people with life-threatening liver disease treated at his hospital.

“This project is about understanding the perspectives, experiences, strengths and needs of the family and friends who care for people contending with advanced liver disease,“ he explained.

Often those perspectives are unexpected. “Caregiving can be burdensome… [especially] when there’s no respite or no support structures. But the argument of the paper we’re [currently writing] is that there are ways in which families also re-valorize the loss of a liver as being productive, as being positive for their families,” he explained. For example, family members recognize the value of closer bonds and the opportunity to spend more time with the person who has become ill than was previously possible.

Placing the patient experience of diagnosis and treatment plans in a research context that goes beyond clinical medical practice parallels Sandesara’s work as a teacher, in which he helps students understand global health (or medical students and residents understand the practice of clinical medicine) within a larger framework of historical, political and economic power relations and patterns of exclusion. The global health minor is fortunate to have a chair who touches so many aspects of UCLA in creative, collaborative and beneficial ways.