This piece originally appeared in our March 2021 magazine.
Dr. Henna Budhwani is an Assistant Professor in the UAB School of Public Health. Budhwani conducts studies to address the causes and consequences of health disparities among stigmatized populations that experience adverse health outcomes in resourceconstrained settings
Budhwani was born in Cook County Hospital, in Chicago, Illinois.
“I share this because Cook County is one of the largest providers of indigent healthcare in the country. Just like many of our first generation students here at UAB, I was not born into wealth and privilege,” she said.
Budhwani said she worked all through college from retail to being a bank teller to a restaurant server. She said she also used to participate in Live Action Roleplay and rollerblade when she was younger.
Budhwani said her path to graduate school was different than most.
“I attended college at Loyola University, came home and attended Harper Community College, and finally graduated from Northern Illinois University in 1998,” Budhwani said.
She said she sends love to other community college attendees.
Budhwani said she worked in marketing and sales in downtown Chicago before relocating to Birmingham, Alabama. Eventually, she went on to receive a master’s in Sociology in 2007, a master’s in Public Health in Health Care Organization and Policy in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Medical Sociology in 2012.
She said she was committed to global development early on because she found the prevalence of poverty inhumane and unacceptable.
Budhwani said her focus is in the realm of action-oriented, implementation science research to improve health equity among underserved populations.
“To address disparities, we need to learn about historic contexts underlying why diverse populations have experienced different trajectories, and we need to elucidate how structural forces, such as racism, misogyny, and stigma, constrain behavior and affect health. This applies globally, in the United States, and here at home in Alabama,” Budhwani said.
Budhwani was the co-recipient of the international Robert Carr Research Award at the international AIDS conference in 2020, alongside Dr. John Waters for the conduct of population size estimates across six eastern Caribbean islands.
“The award recognizes research projects conducted by a community-academia partnership that aims to advance human rights-based policies and practices, mainly in countries where communities disproportionately affected by HIV continue to face discrimination, social rejection, violence and imprisonment, often by government officials and agencies,” she said.
“Just like many of our first generation students here at UAB, I was not born into wealth and privilege.”
Budhwani said she find the hard work immensely rewarding and credits her community partners for working just as hard to ensure their constituents’ needs are met.
“Being an academic means having the freedom to pick up my twin boys from school last Friday and taking them for a trip down 280 to ThirsTea to try bubble tea for the first time, but this also means that I spent all of this past Sunday reviewing grant applications,” she said.
As a final word of wisdom Budhwani said “occasionally eating ice cream sandwiches for breakfast is good for the soul.”
