ABOUT RENUKA NARAIN
RENUKA NARAIN
CO-FOUNDER,
STRATEGY & OPERATIONS LEAD
ABOUT ME
Renuka Narain is co-founder at WIMHS and leads strategy and operations. She is also an MPH student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a research and healthcare operations professional focused on the future of mental health care. Her interests lie at the intersection of clinical innovation, health systems design, and public health policy, with a particular focus on implementation, governance, quality, and patient safety. She is passionate about expanding access to innovative models of care while ensuring strong oversight, accountability, and public trust, and about building mental health systems that better support both patients and clinicians.
MY BACKGROUND
Her previous experience in clinical research includes the conduct and oversight of protocols investigating the pharmacokinetics and cognitive effects of cannabis and tobacco at the Johns Hopkins Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit.
She then worked at Sunstone Therapies for 3 years, as a clinical research coordinator and then as the Quality Assurance and Quality Control Lead. She worked on many different psychedelic-assisted therapy trials, including ones ran by Compass Pathways, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS, aka Lykos and Resilient), Usona Institute, and Helus Pharma (previously known as Cybin) (hyperlink to each), investigating different substances and indications such as Psilocybin for MDD, MDMA for PTSD, and Psilocybin for PTSD.
Former powerlifter now focused on sustainable performance, functional fitness, and long-term health, Renuka is passionate about natural wellness and integrative approaches to health. Her interests have evolved from strength and athletic performance alone to a deeper curiosity about the foundations that support them, including nutrition, recovery, movement, and the everyday habits that fuel human flourishing. She’s especially interested in how to make healthy habits more approachable at every level, from individuals to communities to broader systems. Her work has included deep dives into food and nutrition policy, with a focus on initiatives like farm-to-school programs, whole-foods-based diets, and reducing ultra-processed food exposure in children. She approaches these issues from both a policy and systems perspective, while also exploring how they can be translated into practical, everyday clinical care.
Throughout her MPH degree, Renuka has had the unique opportunity to learn from different experts on developing evidence-based policy recommendations to address pressing public health issues, conducting policy analyses that evaluate trade-offs between effectiveness, affordability, and political feasibility, and examining pharmaceutical policy through a practicum focused on the regulatory and governance structures that shape drug pricing, access, and healthcare system transparency.
WHAT I'M WORKING ON:
I’m using my knowledge of the healthcare system, health policy, and psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) and its critical operational components to brainstorm minimum requirements for equitable and responsible PAT implementation in Maryland. This includes elements of patient safety, ethics, oversight and accountability, and affordability.