Dr. Rajendram Rajnarayanan is currently serving as an Assistant Dean of Research and Associate Professor at NYITCOM at Arkansas State University. As a chemist by training, his research program focuses on building novel tools and techniques to discover new avenues to address health disparities. Dr. Rajnarayanan’s research group has always been an extremely diverse and culturally competent training platform to groom the next generation of scholars. All trainees under Dr. Rajnarayanan’s leadership are required to make a sincere effort to translate their research findings in plain language to reach masses and for easy dissemination as scientific articles as well as blogs, social media articles and newsletters.

Dr. Rajnarayanan has lead and supported various STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) capacity building and competitiveness enhancement programs. Dr. Rajnarayanan served as the chair of the ancillary studies committee of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded Jackson Heart Study in Jackson, Mississippi, and chaired the steering committee of the institute for strategic enhancement of educational diversity at Buffalo, NY.

As a faculty leader, he was able to bring people together to initiate, ignite, and catalyze many diversity initiatives including the Collaborative Learning and Integrated Mentoring in the Biosciences Program (CLIMB), Initiative to Maximize Student Development (IMSD) and Institute for Strategic Enhancement of Educational Diversity (iSEED) and the recently established summer research academy for research exploration (SHARE) program.