Gayatri Moorthi, Ph.D. is Research Coordinator/Research Associate at ICR. She is an interdisciplinary health researcher, who is the Project Supervisor and Ethnographer for the IDU Peer Recruitment Dynamics and Network Structure in RDS project. Her primary research interests lie in the areas of harm reduction, drug use, HIV risk, social suffering, health policy, qualitative research methods, critical medical anthropology and public health. She recently concluded her dissertation research, a multi-sited ethnography, which examined the harm reduction policy and interventions in New Delhi, India. The research evaluated the efficacy and impact of these measures on injecting drug users as well as the dynamics of a peer driven model of intervention. The project examined how notions of risk and ‘pharmaceuticalization’ framed harm reduction and critically reviewed the policies that shaped the context of substance abuse treatment in India.
    She has also worked on projects involving vulnerable families, at risk foster children, low income communities and schools, both in India and the U.S. She has worked across a range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed method research projects. She aims to continue working in the area of health, evolving new methodologies to fuel practical solutions for community concerns and bridge the gap between practice and policy.

Education:
2011 - Ph.D. Social Work, School of Social Work, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Illinois
2004 - Masters in social Work, (Specialization: Medical and Psychiatric Social work), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbia, India
2002 - Bachelors in Psychology (Honors), Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Publications:
Moorthi, G. (2010). Reading women's voices - gendered experience of drug use in India. Perspectives in Social Work. 8(2), 21-24.

Presentations:
Moorthi, “The Forgotten Body of the Addict: The Remains of Harm Reduction”, Presented at American Anthropological Association, 15-20th  November, 2011

Moorthi, “Risky, Futures: Embracing a harm reducing way of life at the margins”. Presented at Council for Social Work Education, 27th-30th October, 2011

Moorthi, “Battling Harm: Fieldwork to Classwork”,Council for Social Work Education, October 14-16th, 2010

Moorthi, “ Risky Health and Fragile Lives: Rethinking Recovery Under Harm Reduction”, Presented at Society for Social Work Research, 14-17th, January, 2010

Moorthi, “ Risky Health and Fragile Lives: Rethinking Recovery Under Harm Reduction”, Presented at American Anthropological Association, 2-6th December, 2009

Moorthi, “Making Harm Reduction Work- Challenges and Contestations of Peer Workers in India”, Presented at Council for Social Work Education 6-9th November, 2009

Moorthi, “A ‘Pharmaceutical survival’: Battling for reducing drug-related harm in India”, Presented at the Society for Medical Anthropology, 24-27th September, 2009

Moorthi, “ Speaking truth to power- Implications for Social Work Education”, Presented at Council for Social Work Education, 30th October- 1st November, 2007.

Moorthi, “ Remaking of identity: Intersections of drug treatment subjects and citizenship”, Presented at American Anthropological Association Conference, 29th November- 2nd December,2007.

Moorthi, “Mediating terrains: Exploring the Intersections of Substance Abuse Treatment and the Community Perspective”, Presented at Midwest ECO Conference, 6-8th October, 2006

Moorthi, “ Performance ethnography- The sacred me- the tales of the privileged” Presented atInternational Congress on Qualitative Inquiry (UIUC), 3-5th May, 2006

Moorthi and Mulder, “Stories of Mothers’ recovering from Methamphetamine Abuse”, Presented atInternational Congress on Qualitative Inquiry (UIUC), 3-5th May, 2005

Affiliations:
CIRA (Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, Yale University)

CICATS (Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science, University of Connecticut Health Center)