Girish Motwani, MPH

Biography

Girish Motwani, MPH is one of two Program Managers for the UCSF Center for Global Surgical Studies (CGSS). Girish received his Bachelor of Science in Molecular Environmental Biology from UC Berkeley. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2014, he went on to pursue his Master of Public Health (MPH) at Yale University, where he focused on health policy, management, and global health. Prior to CGSS, Girish gained experience in various aspects of public health research ranging from bench-based lab work in environmental health to policymaking efforts in urban health.

During his time at UC Berkeley Girish worked at a lab that seeks to understand connections between environmental insults, epigenetics, and human disease. While at Yale, he worked on a project that sought to test the effectiveness of a texting intervention program to help college-aged individuals stop smoking. For his MPH internship Girish worked at the Public Health Foundation of India on two projects: one around the topic of innovations for the delivery of health services in the context of universal health coverage and another around the topic of best practices for the inclusion of marginalized populations in urban health. Girish also served briefly in a consulting position for the Minister of Public Health in his home country, Sint Maarten.

Girish was immediately drawn to global surgery because, as a field relatively in its infancy, it presents several opportunities to discover and innovate.