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Utpal N.  Sandesara

Assistant Professor in Residence
Department: School of Medicine
USandesara@mednet.ucla.edu
Keywords: India

Assistant Professor in Residence, General Internal Medicine-Health Services Research and Global Health (International Institute)

2019 M.D., University of Pennsylvania
2017 Ph.D., Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
2008 A.B., Social Studies, Harvard University

Utpal Sandesara is an internal medicine physician and sociocultural anthropologist with joint appointment in the UCLA School of Medicine’s Division of General Internal Medicine-Health Services Research and the Global Health program at the UCLA International Institute. He is also affiliated with the UCLA Center for India and South Asia.

Dr. Sandesara’s research uses ethnography and other qualitative techniques to examine lived experiences of bodily suffering, structural inequality, and medical care. His first book, No One Had a Tongue to Speak (Prometheus, 2011 – with Tom Wooten), recounts the social history of the 1979 Machhu dam failure in western Gujarat state, a long-neglected disaster that ranks as one of history’s deadliest floods. His current book project, She Is Not Ours, builds on eighteen months of clinic-based ethnography in one district of Gujarat to explore the moral experiences of expectant couples and clinical providers engaging in sex-selective abortion. Other areas of active research for Dr. Sandesara include burnout among medical professionals, family caregiving for socially disadvantaged patients with cirrhosis of the liver, and community-driven solutions for high blood pressure in public-sector healthcare systems.

Clinically, Dr. Sandesara provides primary care for socially and medically vulnerable adult patients at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, a public safety-net hospital in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. His teaching centers on helping learners interrogate illness and inequality using methods, concepts, and empirical material from the critical social sciences. Particular areas of interest include gender and kinship, reproduction, caregiving, public health governance, and contemporary India.