Kiran Kumbhar is a historian of science with research interests in the history of healthcare and health policy in India and broadly the Global South. He completed his doctorate in 2022 at Harvard University with the Department of the History of Science. His dissertation, titled “Healing and Harming: The “Noble Profession” of Medicine in Post-Independence India, 1947-2015,” explores the history of public trust in the biomedical profession, as well as of caste-based privilege among doctors, in post-independence India. He previously studied health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2015), and medicine at the B.J. Govt Medical College in Pune, India (2010).
While at Yale, Kiran worked on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, and conducted research on the history of health policy and healthcare reform in post-independence India, particularly prior to the economic liberalization period (1990s). He also taught two undergraduate seminar courses at Yale: on biomedicine in the Global South, and on tradition and modernity in medicine in South Asia.