Senbagam Virudachalam

Senbagam Virudachalam, MD, MSHP is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and a general pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). She is a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn and a faculty member at PolicyLab and Clinical Futures in the CHOP Research Institute. Dr. Virudachalam is also a member of Philadelphia City Council's Food and Nutrition Security Task Force, The Food Trust Board of Directors, and the National Produce Prescription Collaborative Steering Committee.

Dr. Virudachalam’s research focuses on food justice, advancing equity in diet quality, and health outcomes for all children. She studies cross-sector approaches to ensure that all children have stable access to healthy food environments at home and in their communities, enabling them to thrive and grow into healthy adults. She has extensive experience conducting community-engaged research and randomized trials, especially regarding the evaluation of produce prescriptions and Home Plate, a food skills intervention for parents that she developed in close partnership with Early Head Start.

She earned her MD from the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine and completed her pediatric residency at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. Dr. Virudachalam then earned a Master’s degree in Health Policy Research from the University of Pennsylvania while completing an academic general pediatrics fellowship at CHOP.