Abinaya Ramakrishnan
Class of 2022
Majors: Biological Sciences and Medicine, Health, and Society
Abinaya Ramakrishnan is a junior from the suburbs of Chicago, double majoring in Biological Sciences and Medicine, Health, and Society. She was drawn to Vanderbilt in large part due to the Ingram Scholars Program, which offered an opportunity to join a community of like-minded scholars who are driven to serve their communities. The program has played an integral role in Ramakrishnan’s time at Vanderbilt, forcing her to critically think about service and expand her own boundaries.
Passionate about the intersection of service and mental health education, Ramakrishnan has taken large strides to research and engage with diverse populations. She is currently completing her honors thesis in Medicine, Health, & Society, investigating the intersection of the criminal justice system, LGBTQ+ individuals, and substance use and mental health outcomes; she is a peer educator with the Center for Student Wellbeing’s LEAPS group (Liaisons Educating & Advocating for Psychological Support); and she is part of a new student organization, MoveMENTAL, which is starting conversations about mental health related to cultural backgrounds. In the broader Nashville community, Ramakrishnan volunteers with the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) to provide middle and high school students with mental health education, and she sits on the Young Adult Leadership Council under the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse.
As Ramakrishnan considered what experiences she would incorporate into her Immersion plan, she felt herself wanting to explore another dimension of mental health. “I had been doing direct service through NAMI and working on the logistics aspect of one of their programs,” she says, “I wanted to do something different while leveraging the experiences I already had.” While listening to the nightly news about COVID-19, Ramakrishnan came across a story about the “secondary pandemic,” or the “mental health curve.” Interested to learn more, Ramakrishnan reached out to the person she had seen on the news, and to her surprise, they offered her a position helping to create a database of mental health apps. Ramakrishnan explains, “While many resources and apps exist within the mental health space, there has been no comprehensive database that compiles all the top-rated apps into one place for people to use to find their perfect app.” Along with a team at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Ramakrishnan set out to evaluate apps and compile a public database to serve as a resource for mental health professionals and those seeking support for mental illness.
Through her experience, Ramakrishnan was also able to gain first-hand experience exploring the intersection of technology and medicine. “As healthcare moves towards more technological platforms, I want to understand how I can leverage those resources to better help my patients,” she explains. Ramakrishnan is especially excited about the future of the database as a tool for college, high school, and even middle school students to find an app that works for them.
Ramakrishnan describes her Immersion project as being central to her interests. She says, “Having this opportunity has allowed me to grow in each of the areas that I value: mental health, research, and service.” To other Vanderbilt students who are deciding what to do for Immersion, she shares this reminder: “At no other time in your life will you have so many resources that are available purely for you. . . . Using those resources to be successful is what will make your Vanderbilt experience unique from the person next to you.”
Access the database that Ramakrishnan helped to create: https://apps.digitalpsych.org/.