The Division on South Asian Americans (DoSAA) of the Asian American Psychological Association has given Himadhari Sharma of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School a 2018 student award. DoSAA is a community of students and professionals committed to understanding social, emotional, political, and personal influences affecting South Asians in psychology and creating a forum to impact change for the betterment of South Asian mental health.
Himadhari Sharma is a Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology doctoral student, with an emphasis in Counseling Psychology, working under Dr. Andrés Consoli. Originally from the Twin Cities, Minnesota, she received an undergraduate in business with a specialization in marketing from the University of Minnesota in 2010, after which she worked in the healthcare service industry for four years. She completed her masters in psychology with an emphasis in clinical psychology from New York University (NYU) in 2017. There she conducted research in the realm of hearing voices, looking at various topics, such as stigma, within the general population. She also worked in an intensive outpatient clinic for eating disorder patients at Mount Sinai Hospital as well as completed an internship at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (NIMHANS) in Bangalore, India.
Sharma has been actively involved in the South Asian community through various avenues. As a professionally trained Kathak dancer, she began a Bollywood dance studio, Dance Break, where she worked with both children and adults. There she taught a Bollywood fitness class that attracted many newly immigrated Asian-Indian women. She has also worked with the Freedom Project, in Bangalore, India, with human trafficking victims. Sharmahas also served on the board of directors for myHealth, a non-profit reproductive and mental health clinic, as well as on the public policy board for the YWCA, Minnesota. Her current interests include multicultural psychology, access and utilization for mental health services among minority populations, (especially Asian populations), cross-cultural/international psychology, as well as alternative treatment and therapy options.