Rupi is the cishet daughter of Punjabi-Sikh immigrants, adoring mother to her beloved fur-baby Saint, and proud aunty to her treasured nibling Gavin. She is also a double-board-certified adult and child and adolescent psychiatrist based in Los Angeles, California. She graduated with honors from Harvard Medical School and completed adult psychiatry residency training at the University of Colorado. She then spent three years working for the global health non-profit Partners in Health, primarily in rural Haiti but also in Lima, Peru. She developed dozens of training curricula to teach community health workers, physicians, nurses, psychologists, and social workers how to deliver high-quality, culturally informed healthcare. Many of these materials were endorsed by both the Haitian Ministry of Health and the Pan American Health Organization.

She completed her child psychiatry fellowship training at UCLA, where she was the recipient of the Laughlin Fellowship, a national award recognizing future leaders in the eld of psychiatry. She also developed the very first racism curriculum for child psychiatry fellows, later featured in Academic Psychiatry. Her recent professional focus has centered on antiracism in medicine and mental healthcare. She has authored numerous related papers including: “Nurturing Children’s Mental Health Body and Soul: Confronting American Child Psychiatry’s Racist Past to Reimagine Its Antiracist Future,” “Getting Our Knees O Black People’s Necks: An Antiracist Approach to Medical Care,” and “Teaching Antiracism to the Next Generation of Doctors,” and “An Antiracist Approach to Achieving Mental Health Equity.” An invited speaker at grand rounds and symposia nationwide, her recent presentations have included “No More Building Resiliency: Confronting American Medicine’ White Supremacist Past to Reimagine Its Antiracist Future” and “The Legacy of Slavery in American Medicine and Psychiatry.”

She is grateful to her colleague Russyan Mabeza for welcoming her to be a co-founder of the Antiracist Healing Collaborative, home of the Antiracism in Medicine Curriculum Series. She can be found on twitter: @RupiLegha, IG: RupiLeghaMD, website: RupiLeghaMD.com, and email: antiracistmd@gmail.com.