Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research
Professor and Associate Dean for Research, School of Social Work
ramesh.raghavan@rutgers.edu, (848) 932-5337
Ramesh Raghavan is Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the School of Social Work at Rutgers. Before coming to Rutgers, he was an Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, with a primary appointment at the Brown School, and a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine. At the Brown School he also served as principal investigator and training director of an NIMH T32 pre- and postdoctoral training program in mental health services research.
Dr Raghavan conducts mental health services research on the needs of vulnerable children, with a specific interest in children in the child welfare system. Dr Raghavan has conducted studies on access to mental health services among child welfare-involved populations, including studies on the effects of Medicaid managed care (funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ]), and on the effects of health insurance instability on mental health service use (funded by the Administration for Children and Families). He has conducted several studies on quality of care, including on the use of public finance mechanisms to promote quality of mental health services (funded by the National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH]), racial/ethnic disparities in Medicaid-funded mental health expenditures for children with histories of maltreatment (funded by NIMH), and on the development of novel risk adjustment mechanisms to better insure the mental health needs of children with emotional disorders (funded by AHRQ).
Dr Raghavan chairs NIMH’s Mental Health Services Research review committee (SERV), and serves on the editorial boards of Child Maltreatment, and Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research. In early 2015, he served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the Commissioner, Administration on Children, Youth and Families in the US Department of Health and Human Services, working primarily on the Administration’s psychotropic medication use and childhood trauma initiatives.
Dr Raghavan completed medical school at Stanley Medical College, Madras, India in 1994, and a psychiatric residency at Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, India in 1997, before coming to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While at UCLA he completed a fellowship in pediatric pain in 1999, following which he worked at the UCLA/RAND Center for Adolescent Health Promotion, a joint center between UCLA and the RAND Corporation that undertakes research and policy analysis on issues related to child and adolescent health. He earned a PhD in health services from the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA in 2003.