Sriram Shamasunder is a doctor/poet who started writing poetry during college at UC Berkeley where he studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco, and co-founder of the HEAL Initiative, a health workforce strengthening fellowship working in Navajo Nation and 7 countries around the world. HEAL currently has over 50 fellows in 2016.

He was awarded the Young Physician of the Year in 2010, by the Northern California Chapter of the American College of Physicians and was named an Asia21 fellow by the Asia Foundation in 2012.

Sri was a Fulbright-Nehru scholar to India in 2012. He is interested in a telling of necessary, under told stories as well as health equity. In 2016, he gave a Berkeley Ted X talk entitled "Whose Suffering Matters Less, and Why"?