Independent (SARAVANAN THANGARAJAN)

Saravanan Thangarajan builds climate resilient health systems that protect women, caregivers, and children living under compounding environmental and social stress. He works at the intersection of climate adaptation, maternal and caregiver mental health, disability inclusion, and public sector delivery. His focus is practical: convert climate risk into care pathways that frontline systems can run with limited staff, limited data, and high stigma environments. In South India, he led mixed methods research across all 38 districts of Tamil Nadu, linking heat, air pollution, and food insecurity to measurable increases in stress and depression among mothers caring for children with disabilities. He translates findings into government ready options, including service redesign, implementation frameworks, and monitoring approaches that prioritize functioning and dignity. He brings delivery leadership from large scale public systems. In Tamil Nadu, he supported emergency and maternal child platforms serving more than 7 million people, strengthened emergency response capacity through training 5,500 paramedics, and helped expand tele mental health access reaching more than 369,000 individuals. In Vietnam, he supported integration of climate and health into medical education through academic and policy partnerships. He contributes to global policy and evidence pathways through roles including Member of the UNDRR Stakeholder Engagement Mechanism, supporting Sendai aligned guidance on early warning systems, equity, and community based adaptation, and external funding advisor in the Wellcome Trust climate and health portfolio. Within Catalyst Now, he seeks cross sector collaborations that move from evidence to deployment, linking governments, academia, civil society, and innovators to build climate linked mental health and caregiving systems that protect the most vulnerable first.