Dr Sharuna Verghis joined the Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, as a Senior Lecturer in 2017. She is a public health researcher, educator, and humanitarian. Her doctoral thesis on the access of urban refugee women to maternal health care was an inter-disciplinary study combining international human rights law with public health.

Her interest in public health was sparked while doing her MPhil thesis on the drugs and pharmaceutical industry. After an early career stint in teaching, she went on to work on the issue of migration and health at national and international levels.  She was the first Regional Coordinator of CARAM-Asia and set up the network’s regional secretariat in Kuala Lumpur in 2001. She has extensive work experience in relation to HIV and mobility in South and South East Asia, and the Middle East, and has provided technical support for the establishment of community-based organizations working on mobility and HIV in Vietnam and Cambodia.

She has served on national, regional, and international research and intervention projects and has a keen interest in engaging on these projects from a multidisciplinary perspective.