Sachini Bandara

Sachini Bandara, PhD, MS serves as the Director of Training for the Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy. Dr. Bandara is a health policy and health services researcher and is an assistant professor of Mental Health (primary) and Health Policy and Management (joint) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She conducts health policy research related to mental health and substance use, with a focus on state policy responses to the U.S. overdose crisis, populations involved in the criminal legal system and pregnant and parenting people. She is a mixed methods researcher who uses qualitative, survey and implementation science methods to understand policy implementation and lived experience and uses quasi-experimental methods with administrative data to understand policy effects.