Gunisha Kaur, M.D., M.A.

Dr. Gunisha Kaur is an anesthesiologist specializing in human rights research. She serves as the Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab, a Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights, a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Faculty Fellow at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Dr. Kaur’s research interests focus on displaced populations such as migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. She has used her extensive training and research in neuroscience as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights through scientific methodology. This has involved clinical research and clinical trials on issues such as chronic pain in torture survivors, mental health of children who are displaced, and trafficking of young women and girls in refugee camps. Her innovative research has been supported by competitive awards from the National Institutes of Health, the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research, and Cornell University.

In 2004, she published her first book, Lost in History: 1984 Reconstructed, which documents human rights violations in India, and in 2018 published an interactive, digital textbook, Essentials of Global Health and Human Rights for Physicians.

A graduate of Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical College, Dr. Kaur completed her anesthesiology residency at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine in 2014. She earned an MA in medical anthropology from Harvard University in 2015.