Dr Rangaswamy  Thara  

Board member

Dr Rangaswamy Thara is a psychiatrist by training and the co-Founder and Vice Chairman, of a not-for-profit organisation called SCARF (Schizophrenia Research Foundation) in the city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu. SCARF is a premier centre offering treatment and rehabilitation for people with mental illness.

After her PhD on the subject of disability, she lobbied hard for the inclusion of mental disability in the Indian Disabilities Act. She was also responsible for the development of a tool called IDEAS which is officially used to measure disability in schizophrenia. She has collaborated with premier institutions around the world such as the Johns Hopkins, USA, Institute of Psychiatry, UK and others in Australia, Canada etc. She has over 180 peer reviewed publications.

Her main research has been the Madras Longitudinal study, a 35-year follow-up of persons with first episode schizophrenia. She has published several papers on various facets of outcome, functioning and recovery.

She is on the Advisory Committee to the Director General of the World Health Organization, and is also on the editorial Board of several reputed journals

She was awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, UK in 2014 and also the Presidents Gold Medal from the Royal College, UK in 2012. She was recognized by Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS) for her research in clinical and community psychiatry in 2019.

Wikipedia- Thara Rangaswamy