Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD

Lakshmi Krishnan is a physician and cultural historian of medicine at Georgetown University, where she is the Founding Director of the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative. She is a nationally recognized scholar of diagnosis and diagnostic disparities, and is writing a cultural history of diagnosis for Johns Hopkins University Press. Her innovation in the medical humanities has resulted in numerous research publications, grants, and recognition including a U.S. Rhodes Scholarship, the Isis Poetry Prize (given by Oxford's oldest literary magazine), and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She has won awards from the Academy of Communication in Healthcare and the Association of American Medical Colleges, and appeared on media such as Voice of America, Science News, and The History Channel.

 

She received a DPhil (PhD) in English Literature from the University of Oxford, MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and completed an Internal Medicine residency at Duke before returning to Johns Hopkins for a fellowship in General Internal Medicine and History of Medicine. She has been on the faculty at Georgetown since 2020.