Abhigna Rao is a Student Research Assistant with Abacus Evaluation at the UNC Center for Health Equity Research and is pursuing her MPH in Health Behavior from the Gillings School of Global Public Health. She also serves as a Graduate Research Assistant with the Center for Aging and Health in the UNC School of Medicine studying health disparities in cancer care access among aging populations.
Rao earned her Honors Bachelor of Arts in Interpersonal Communication from the University of Delaware. While there, she contributed to multiple evaluation projects at the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy (CRESP at UD) and wrote her undergraduate thesis on student experiences and priorities in settings of higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was later published in the Delaware Journal of Public Health.
At a high level, she is passionate about program implementation, evaluation, and qualitative research, and hopes to apply those to areas of health literacy, women’s and family health, and cross-cultural inequities.
