About Dr. Aditi Pajiyar, MBBS

Training as a physician, graduating with gold

Aditi earned her MBBS at the Nepalese Army Institute of Health Sciences, affiliated with Tribhuvan University, and graduated as a university gold medalist. Medical school showed her how much illness goes unspoken, especially illness of the mind.

• MBBS, NAIHS (Tribhuvan University)
• University gold medalist

Caring for patients the system overlooks

As a medical officer she worked in two very different settings: Provincial Hospital Jaleshwar in Madhesh Province, on the border with India, and the Central Jail Hospital in Kathmandu. Alongside, she volunteered at Mental Hospital Lagankhel, Nepal’s national psychiatric hospital, and in the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at Kanti Children’s Hospital. In every one of these places, psychiatric need was constant and specialist care was scarce. Today she works in the Department of Psychiatry at Spandan Healthcare.

• Department of Psychiatry, Spandan Healthcare (current)
• Medical Officer, Provincial Hospital Jaleshwar
• Medical Officer, Central Jail Hospital, Kathmandu
• Volunteer, Mental Hospital Lagankhel
• Volunteer, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Kanti Children’s Hospital
• Extern, St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC

Taking the conversation to families and schools

As a Fellow of the National Health Action Force Nepal (NHAFN) Mental Health Leadership Program, Cohort 1, she designed and led MindWell, a public-education series on student and child mental health. It brought psychiatrists, a psychologist, and a teacher into the same conversation as parents and students. NHAFN gave it the program’s Best Project Award.

• Best Project Award, NHAFN Mental Health Leadership Program, Cohort 1
• Volunteer, Nepal Institute of Mental Health (NIOMH)
• Mental Health Advisor, Manakal
• Volunteer, Health Foundation of Nepal

Turning hard cases into shared knowledge

In 2026 alone she co-authored seven psychiatry papers across six journals with a clinical psychiatry research group, and was first author on one. The cases span schizoaffective disorder in Prader-Willi syndrome, postpartum and bipolar mood disorders, drug-induced mania, antipsychotic weight gain, Lennox–Gastaut syndrome, and gender-affirming care.

• First author, International Journal of Advanced Research
• Co-author, Annals of Clinical Psychiatry

Teaching people to recognise risk

As an OMLAS fellow, she led an awareness workshop on suicide and self-harm prevention for NELIS and One Million Leaders Asia. It helped young leaders understand the difference between the two, and how a single conversation can open the door to help.

• OMLAS Fellow 2026, One Million Leaders Asia

Representing Nepal’s next generation

At the 2025 State of the World Forum she was a panelist on “The State of Our World: Code Red,” a session moderated by Forum founder Jim Garrison, and brought Nepal’s perspective to the Human Intelligence track.

• Panelist, State of the World Forum 2025
• AJPHI Fellow 2026

An externship at St. Elizabeths Hospital

Aditi trained as an extern at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, a public psychiatric hospital founded in 1855 and one of the oldest in the United States. She worked alongside a U.S. psychiatry team, seeing how inpatient psychiatric care is delivered in the system where she hopes to train.

• Extern, St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC

The training she is working toward

Aditi hopes to train in psychiatry in the United States. She is ECFMG certified and is applying to residency in the 2027 Match. She wants to learn from the programs and patients that residency brings, and to carry that training back into the work she has already begun: care for people in under-resourced settings, research, and lowering the barriers that keep people from mental health care.