Professor Arunthathi Mahendran is the Founding Director of the SHAPE Institute for Health at Queen Mary University of London, where she works alongside local residents, community partners and colleagues to reimagine health and healthcare as a local, neighbourhood venture. A former Director of the medical school at QMUL and a Consultant Transplant Surgeon (Honorary) at Barts Health NHS Trust, she brings together experience from higher education and clinical practice — but mostly, she brings curiosity, care and a belief that better, meaningful health begins in everyday life. 

Arunthathi’s career has been shaped by a simple conviction: when healthcare begins with the real lives, values and experiences of the people it serves — honouring what matters most to each person — it can become deeply authentic, profoundly effective and genuinely respectful of both our shared humanity and our individual differences. Driven by this belief, she has spent over a decade widening opportunities for those often overlooked in medical training, including students with disabilities, neurodivergent learners, young people from lower-income backgrounds and minority ethnic communities. She feels incredibly fortunate that this work has been recognised nationally — but even more grateful to the students and teachers who continue to challenge, inspire and shape her thinking. 

Her journey through medicine and ethics has taken her across cities and disciplines — from transplant surgery training in London and New York, to an ethics fellowship in Chicago, and later a PhD at Goldsmiths. These experiences shaped her book Moments of Rupture, where she explores how the often unspoken and non-visible sights, sounds and sensory experiences of healthcare can unsettle us, creating powerful ruptures in our understanding that open our eyes to what care truly means. By paying attention to these powerful, messy moments instead of pushing them aside, she shows how practitioners can become more thoughtful, impactful and human in their work — an idea that strongly echoes the community-rooted values at the heart of SHAPE Health. 

At SHAPE Health, Arunthathi now works with communities across East London to understand what health means to them — and what gets in the way. Together with residents, frontline workers and public services, she is helping to co-create practical, neighbourhood-based approaches to prevention and care that reflect people’s real lives and aspirations for their future.   

What motivates her most is the possibility of building communities where people feel connected, supported and able to live well in the places they call home. She sees this work not as her own, but as a collective effort — one rooted in trust, shared learning and the belief that small, local changes can help shape a more caring and sustainable future for everyone.