Refugee Immigrant Child Health Initiative Speaker Event

ICAAP’s Refugee Immigrant Child Health Initiative (RICHI) welcomes Dr. Vidya Ramanathan, MD, MPH, FAAP to speak on Human Rights and Children’s Health: A Multilink Bond.

We will first go over human rights and child rights broadly, and then cover some human rights violations in immigrant and refugee children. Then we will talk about the impacts that these human rights violations have on children’s health. The connection between human rights violations and children’s mental and physical health is a multifactorial one. Finally, we will end with concrete steps participants may take when working with immigrant/refugee children in a clinical setting.

Dr. Ramanathan is a pediatrician in Ann Arbor, MI. She is the medical director of the University of Michigan Asylum Collaborative and a medical expert for Physicians for Human Rights. She is a director of CORDUSA – Global Network, overseeing global projects at the grassroots level for community development. She worked at the Starr Commonwealth Emergency Intake Site for unaccompanied minors for the entirety of its operation in 2021-2022. Lessons from this work and from her work with asylum seekers over the past 2 decades have inspired this talk.