Alumnus Kunchok Dorjee Works to Curb Spread of Tuberculosis in His Homeland

Born into a Tibetan refugee settlement area in northern India, Kunchok Dorjee, MPH '10, MD, PhD couldn't imagine his journey would eventually lead to what has been a highly impactful career in global public health. But after earning his Master's degree in Public Health (MPH) at Stony Brook University, that's exactly what happened.

"When I was a child, I saw a lot of diseases," he said. "I went to a refugee school, there weren't good facilities. We had tuberculosis, scabies, polio… all sorts of conditions. I grew up in an environment where basic health needs were lacking. Individuals would get treated but the disease always stayed."

Dorjee is now a physician-epidemiologist and assistant professor of Medicine and International Health at Johns Hopkins University, whose work focuses on the prevention and control of infectious diseases on population level.

He said his journey was further influenced by experiences he had visiting his mother in the hospital.

"I saw the value and meaning of the medical profession and the public health profession, and those experiences made me pursue this field," he said. "We didn't have a good public health approach, and that inspired me to pursue a public health education. That's how I came to Stony Brook."

In 2008, Dorjee was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to pursue his MPH at Stony Brook, part of the university's long-standing relationship with the Tibetan government in exile that dates back to 1990, when the 14th Dalai Lama visited Stony Brook to lecture and receive an honorary degree.

"From a remote town in India, I was dropped right into the middle of Manhattan and all those skyscrapers," he recalled. "I got out of the bus and all I could do was just look up and around, amazed at what human beings had done."

With funding and an opportunity to pursue public health, Dorjee began the journey that would lead to Johns Hopkins.

"At the time I didn't even know the difference between public health and medicine," he said. "I learned what epidemiology is. I learned about the importance of good data and how data can be used to inform practice and policy, and I also learned about programs policies. Stony Brook showed me that."

Two years later, Dorjee returned to India to put together a Tibetan tuberculosis control program. It also offered an opportunity to apply for a UN grant working with John Hopkins, where he went into the community and screened more than 30,000 people for tuberculosis.

"I could have never done that without the education I got at Stony Brook," he said. "We learned the epidemiology of tuberculosis in the community, we saw that the majority of TB cases were happening in the boarding schools, monasteries and nunneries. We saw that tuberculosis was more prevalent in younger people. After we learned these subtleties, we were able to address the problem not just from an individual standpoint, but from a community level."

Kunchok credits the late Arthur Grollman as a mentor. Grollman, who passed away in February 2024, was professor of medicine and founding chair of the Department of Pharmacological Sciences at Stony Brook. Grollman visited Tibet on several occasions, and it was he who invited the Dalai Lama to visit Stony Brook, prompting then president John Marburger to award the distinguished visitor an honorary degree.

Since 1990, in a special arrangement between the university and the Tibetan government in exile, Tibetan students are given an opportunity to pursue graduate education at Stony Brook and to bring their knowledge and skills back to their community of refugees in Dharamsala. The scholarship program is partly funded by the Fulbright Scholar Program and administered by the Tibet Fund, an educational and vocational training program.

"I worked in Dr. Grollman's lab for more than a year, and it was a very good collaboration," said Dorjee. "My research was focused on understanding the association between aristolochic acid and upper urothelial cancer."

Kunchok said the program taught him the importance of scientific rigor.

"I saw the benefits of lab-based investigation and how that relates to disease control in the community," he said. "I also learned the meaning of translational research at Stony Brook. For the first time, I learned about how translational resources and bench science translate to policies, practice, and ultimately improving health outcomes of human beings."

Dorjee received his PhD in epidemiology at University of California, Berkeley, before joining Johns Hopkins as a postdoc. Once there, he put together a program called Zero TB in Kids, a tuberculosis elimination initiative that has been in place for the past eight years. He goes back to India frequently for these projects and other education improvement initiatives. "We managed to reduce tuberculosis rates by more than 80 percent in the boarding schools that I attended, and in the monasteries and nunneries in the community," Dorjee said. "It's very gratifying to be able to give back in a meaningful and tangible way."

While he didn't have a grand plan, Dorjee said he was driven by the problems he encountered, and the human beings whose problems he was able to identify. "Many of these problems were problems that I faced," he said. "Many of these problems were problems that my parents faced, or our community, or any part of the world where resources were insufficient."

Dorjee has remained engaged with Stony Brook's alumni of Tibetan refugees, a community of 18 public health scholars and practitioners, has served on the admissions committee for the Program in Public Health, and was honored as a recipient of the Norman H. Edelman Alumni Excellence Award in 2018.

Dorjee said he hopes Stony Brook will continue to support Tibetan students.

"Stony Brook has given education to so many Tibetan children, and they're all doing great," he said. "I hope that this collaboration can continue, not just because of the Tibetan communities that benefit, but because we make a meaningful contribution to global health at large."

- Robert Emproto