
Rajeev Ramchand
Senior Behavioral Scientist, RAND Corporation
2021, 2022, 2023
Rajeev Ramchand is a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation where he co-directs the RAND Epstein Family Veterans Policy Research Institute. He is a nationally recognized expert in research on suicide and suicide prevention and has published on suicide prevention generally, among service members, veterans, and members of law enforcement. He co-authored a toolkit to help organizations evaluate their own suicide prevention programs that he adapted for use by community-based organizations working to counter violent extremism. He has conducted research with family and friends who lost a loved one to suicide, and recently used a similar approach to conduct and compile narratives from former extremists and their family members, culminating in the report “Violent Extremism in America: Interviews with Former Extremists and Their Families on Radicalization and Deradicalization.”He has testified before the California State Senate and before the United States House of Representatives and Senate and was a panelist at the National Academies of Science workshop “Health Approaches in Community-Level Strategies to Countering Violent Extremism and Radicalization.” Other current areas of research include military and veteran caregivers, veteran homelessness, the role of firearm availability, storage, and policies on suicide, and the use of novel technologies and approaches to identify emerging epidemics and disease outbreaks. He received his B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in psychiatric epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The effort to eradicate hate requires the active participation of every component of our society, to include governments, the private sector, communities of faith and indeed every aspect of civil society. There is no more urgent task in front of us. The organizers of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit are doing the United States and the world an enormous service by tackling hatred and extremism with a focus on honest dialogue and conversation, genuine learning and practical solutions. This will not happen overnight, but the Pittsburgh community’s leadership in this effort is genuinely inspiring and motivating.
