Amita N. Vyas is a nonresident senior fellow at the South Asia Center. She is also an associate professor and director of the Maternal and Child Health Program in the Department of Prevention and Community Health at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. 

At the age of 20, Professor Vyas journeyed to Calcutta to work alongside Mother Teresa in the Missionaries of Charity. In one eye-opening summer, she saw what the social determinants of health and well-being really mean to vulnerable populations, and from that extraordinary experience decided to pursue a career in public health. Today, her work focuses on reproductive health care, adolescent health, and the health and development of immigrant children and adolescents. She is also an expert in multi-level research methods and evaluation.

Dr. Vyas continues to hold an adjunct position in the Department of Population and Family Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was previously on the research faculty of that institution’s Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, where she earned its Kann-Trowbridge Award for outstanding research in the area of population and family health. Dr. Vyas’s commitment to teaching was recognized recently as she received the Morton A. Bender Teaching Award from the George Washington University.