Dr. Puneet K.C. Sahota is the Division Head of Consultation-Liaison and Emergency Psychiatry and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in Camden, NJ. She is also the Director of Research at the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA), a national non-profit organization devoted to the well-being of American Indian/Alaska Native children and families.
At NICWA, Dr. Sahota is Principal Investigator for the Positive Indian Parenting Pilot Study, a randomized control trial of a culturally-based parenting curriculum. She also provides research support more broadly to American Indian/Alaska Native communities for policymaking, advocacy, and program development in child welfare and mental health.
From 2017-2021, she was faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Psychiatry. She served as director of Systems Psychiatry residency curriculum, course director for Cultural and Family Psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry training clinic director, and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, where she taught courses for undergraduates.
Dr. Sahota enrolled in the Honors Program in Medical Education (HPME) combined undergraduate/medical school program at Northwestern University in 1999. She graduated with her A.B. in American Studies in 2002, summa cum laude and valedictorian. She then was the first MD/PhD student in cultural anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation was on cultural and ethical issues related to genetics research in American Indian/Alaska Native communities.
Dr. Sahota completed her residency training in general psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. She was recipient of the Excellence in Family Centered Care Award from the Association of Family Psychiatrists and was an American Psychiatric Association (APA)/Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Minority Fellow. She is board certified in general psychiatry, and her clinical interests include consultation-liaison, emergency, and cultural/family psychiatry.
Her scholarly focus is in applying the tools of anthropology to create systems change, with the goal of improving the mental health of underserved individuals and communities. She also brings an anthropological lens to quality/process improvement work in hospital-based psychiatry, using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods. She has produced over 40 scholarly publications and presentations.
Dr. Sahota and her husband, Gurmukh Sahota, MD, PhD (anesthesiologist and informaticist), live in Penn Valley, PA with their two sons.