Kamal Menghrajani named White House Fellow

Indian American cancer physician Kamal Menghrajani is one of the 15 “exceptional young leaders” appointed to the 2023-2024 class of White House Fellows to gain first-hand experience working at the highest levels of the Federal government.

New York-based Menghrajani, who treats patients with leukemia, has been placed within the Executive Office of the President at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, with a focus on health outcomes and cancer health policy, President’s Commission on White House Fellows announced Sep 20.

While on faculty at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, she conducted cancer research focused on early diagnosis and prevention, according to her White House profile.

READ: Lav Varshney among 2022-2023 class of White House fellows (September 16, 2022)

“I have prior expertise managing thousands of volunteers and community organizers, working on startups in the global health space, conducting epidemiology field research, and building global health collaborations,” Menghrajani wrote on LinkedIn.

“I have served oncology patients in international contexts, at Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai and at the Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala,” she wrote.

She has also spearheaded health equity efforts for vulnerable populations in global contexts, including Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Uganda.

As an entrepreneur, Menghrajani has co-founded startups to address unmet needs in cancer treatment and deploy AI for rapid cancer diagnosis.

READ: Two Indian American women selected for White House Fellows program (August 23, 2016)

She helped grow the non-profit Nourish International, which engages student leaders as social entrepreneurs in international development work.

Menghrajani is also passionate about using journalism as a tool for health education. Having completed her MD at University of North Carolina and her MS in Biostatistics at Columbia University,

Menghrajani trained in medicine at the University of Michigan and as chief fellow at MSK. Her clinical expertise is in leukemia and her research interests are in clonal hematopoiesis (changes in the bone marrow that occur with aging), genomics, MPNs, and developing / assessing new therapeutics through investigator-initiated clinical trials and cutting-edge clinical research.

She is the recipient of an ASCO Young Investigator Award and an NIH K12 Career Development Award.

Menghrajani is a candidate for an MS in Biostatistics at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. Her coursework has focused on developing expertise in biostatistics, epidemiology, clinical trial development, and the use and implementation of machine learning / artificial intelligence algorithms in healthcare and medical research.

Her prior experience in medical and health policy journalism includes writing for web and researching stories for the ABC News Health Unit and writing / producing / voicing stories for KQED, San Francisco’s affiliate for National Public Radio (NPR), according to her LinkedIn profile.

Under the White House Fellows program founded in 1964, fellows spend a year working with senior White House Staff, Cabinet Secretaries, and other top-ranking Administration officials, and leave the Administration equipped to serve as better leaders in their communities.

“This year’s Fellows advanced through a highly competitive selection process, and they are a remarkably gifted, passionate, and accomplished group,” according to the announcement.

“These Fellows bring experience from across the country and from a broad cross-section of professions, including from the private sector, local government, academia, non-profits, medicine, and the armed forces,” it said.

Applications for the 2024-2025 Fellowship year will be accepted starting Nov 1, 2023. The application link and additional information is available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/get-involved/fellows/apply/.