Anita Chandra

Anita Chandra is vice president and director of RAND Social and Economic Well-Being and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. She served as director of RAND Justice, Infrastructure and Environment and as director of RAND's Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department. She leads studies on civic well-being and urban planning; community resilience and long-term disaster recovery; effects of military deployment; health in all policies and advancing a culture of health; and child health and development.

Throughout her career, Chandra has engaged government and nongovernmental partners to consider cross-sector solutions for improving community well-being and to build more robust systems and evaluation capacity. This work has taken many forms, including engaging with federal and local government agencies on building systems for emergency preparedness and resilience both in the U.S. and globally; partnering with private sector organizations to develop the science base around child systems; and collaborating with city governments and foundations to reform data systems and measure environmental sustainability, well-being, and civic transformation. Chandra has also partnered with community organizations to conduct broad-scale health and environmental needs assessments, to examine the integration of health and human service systems, and to determine how to address the needs of historically marginalized populations in human service systems. These projects have occurred in partnership with businesses, foundations, and other community organizations. Chandra earned a Dr.P.H. in population and family health sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.