Shalini Tendulkar

Shalini A. Tendulkar, ScD is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Community Health at Tufts University. Dr. Tendulkar has extensive experience in community-based participatory research (CBPR), collaborating with partners from diverse communities. Prior to joining the Community Health Department at Tufts, Dr. Tendulkar was a Research and Evaluation Scientist at the Institute for Community Health at the Cambridge Health Alliance. In this role she designed and implemented community health needs assessments and worked extensively with partners to build the evidence-base for community programs through research and evaluation. Her projects ranged from partnerships to address men of color health inequities, mental health within immigrant communities, parenting support programs, and programs to support family members of children with mental illness. Dr. Tendulkar has published her work in peer-reviewed journals and presented in local and national settings, often in collaboration with her community partners and is on the board of CHNA17, a regional health coalition whose mission is to promote healthier people and communities by fostering community engagement, elevating innovative and best practices, advancing racial equity, and supporting reciprocal learning opportunities to address the needs of the most marginalized members of our communities. In March 2020, Dr. Tendulkar founded a mutual aid network in her community in response to COVID-19 and continues to work with over 3500 members to support the most marginalized members of her community in accessing food and other supports.

As an educator, Dr. Tendulkar enjoys and is committed to mentoring and training students to support their involvement in community partnered research and in research more broadly. She has trained over 60 undergraduate students through her CBPR course, chaired over 10 undergraduate honors theses and worked with many undergraduate students to connect them to local community-based internships. Dr. Tendulkar has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in research methods, CBPR, inequities in health and qualitative research.

As an advisor, Dr. Tendulkar is deeply invested in her students and aims to understand their personal, academic, social and career aspirations in order to provide students with individualized attention. In 2018, she received the Tufts Multicultural Service Award for her efforts to "define Tufts as a multicultural environment in which race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and sexual orientation are not barriers to the full enjoyment of community membership."

She holds a Doctorate and Master of Science in Maternal and Child Health from the Harvard School of Public Health and a Bachelor's degree, with a major in Psycho-biology and a minor in English from Wellesley College.