by Chloe Landen
Nishita Pondugula was raised in a suburb of Dallas, where she described religion as everywhere and all at once. Christianity, she recalled, abounded in her hometown, permeating nearly all aspects of her lived experience. Raised in Hinduism, Nishita struggled to understand the forms of religion that defined her community, education, and friendships. As she grappled with her impending graduation from high school in the spring of 2016—a national period rife with rising religious and political queries and debates—Nishita wondered how she could transform her own developing questions into her forthcoming academic pursuit. Though Nishita always knew she wanted to attend medical school, she recognized that she was at a critical juncture in her academic journey where she could devote four years to exploring a subject she was passionate about and not directly related to health. Thus, in April, after receiving acceptance to the University of Texas at Austin, Nishita made a bold choice: she switched her incoming major to Religious Studies.
During her years at the Forty Acres, Nishita explored much of what UT’s Department of Religious Studies offered, taking courses with Dr. Brent Landau, Dr. Chad Seales, and Professor Emeriti Dr. L. Michael White and Dr. John Traphagan. Broadly, the study of religion allowed her to think critically about systems, power, and oppression. More specifically, as the end of her undergraduate studies drew near and she began contemplating her future as a doctor, Religious Studies helped her develop new, innovative ideas and approaches to medicine that fundamentally questioned the status quo. Oftentimes, these acquired ways of thinking overlapped. Nishita’s most significant takeaway from her time in Religious Studies was the need to move away from the world religions model—or the idea that knowing the basics of all major global religious traditions allows us to understand different people better. The limitations of the world religions model were not only compelling to her but also served as a useful framework once Nishita became a medical student at Yale. In medicine, Nishita reflected, there is an older model of ‘cultural competency’ that still prevails, where voices insist that practitioners must learn extensively about different cultures before situating their work within each patient’s culture. This, Nishita contends, is a similarly limiting framework. Instead, Nishita advocates for a patient-centered model that emphasizes structural competency and cultural humility, never shying away from asking patients what they want, believe, and care about.
As a medical student, Nishita has been less formally engaged with the study of religion, but she still credits Religious Studies for allowing her to bridge different ideas and disciplines to the field of medicine, informing her research interests at the intersection of health justice, reproductive justice, and bioethics. In fact, her training in Religious Studies influenced her decision to complete a Master of Science in Bioethics at Harvard between her third and fourth years of medical school and has affected several of her research publications. Nishita currently has a paper under review that explores a longstanding topic within bioethics: the ethics of research in pregnancy. Situating the issue within the context of a new class of drugs, GLP-1 agonists, Nishita asks readers to think more critically about the consequences of excluding pregnant people from research. In February, Nishita published a piece in the AMA Journal of Ethics that interrogated the relationship between reimbursement rates and pain management in OB/GYN clinical settings, suggesting that low reimbursement rates for office-based gynecologic procedures (OBGPs) result from multiple layers of oppression and contribute substantially to normalizing pain for gynecological patients. Last year, Nishita released an article titled “Against a New Wave of Vaccine Apartheid” that challenged the proclaimed neutrality of scholars’ research concerning vaccine-sensitive rationing, arguing instead that their ‘neutrality’ aligned with particular moral, ethical, and ideological commitments.
As it did before her first year of undergrad, the study of religion still informs how Nishita personally and critically engages with politics, racism, and systemic injustice. Her training in Religious Studies allowed her to witness the existence of complexity, accept it, and moreover desire to continue unearthing it. People are complicated, religion is complicated, our national culture is complicated, she asserted, and that is all okay. For Nishita, scholars and practitioners are called to spend time figuring out the complexity around us and do justice to all the different people who exist in our world, especially those who are marginalized. Nishita recently matched into OB/GYN residency at Duke University and is thrilled to be starting her OB/GYN training there in June. Her future goal is to become an academic clinician—a professor and researcher at a medical school alongside engaging with clinical practice—where her interest in bridging scholarly disciplines and desire to continue embracing complexity will certainly prevail.
About Nishita Pondugula:
Nishita Pondugula, MS, is a fourth-year medical student at Yale School of Medicine who matched into Duke University’s OB/GYN residency. She has two recent publications, “Against a New Wave of Vaccine Apartheid: Reconceptualizing Justice in Vaccine-Sensitive Rationing” (2024) and “What Does Our Tolerance of Poor Management of Patients’ Pain Have to Do With Reimbursement Inequity for Office-Based Gynecologic Procedures?” (2025). With other research underway, Nishita remains broadly involved with work at the intersection of health justice, reproductive justice, and bioethics.
About the Author:
Chloe Landen is a PhD student in the Religion of the Americas concentration within UT’s Department of Religious Studies. Her work specializes in U.S. Protestantism within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in the social gospel movement, religious nationalism, and racial violence. She is currently working on a project examining the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) and the relationship between anti-lynching activism, religion, womanhood, and privatization of the death penalty.