Meet Navjot
Navjot Buttar is a public health strategist working at the intersection of epidemiology, health communication, and public trust shaping how modern health systems communicate, build trust, and earn credibility among communities. Her work centers on a simple but urgent question: how do people decide what to believe about their health, and who earns the right to be trusted when it matters most? Her work focuses on the forces that shape what people believe about their health, especially the roles of language, power, and institutional behavior. She studies misinformation as a systems problem rooted in trust and access, and advocates for health literacy as a long-term public health infrastructure.
Her work is grounded in both clinical experience and advanced public health training. Born and raised in India, Navjot began her career in dentistry after graduating from Sri Guru Ram Das Dental College and Research Institute. Clinical practice revealed a pattern that would define her professional direction. Many of the health crises she treated were not failures of medicine. They were failures of understanding. Information was present, yet inaccessible. Communication was available, yet ineffective. Trust was fragile, often already broken. That insight led her to advanced doctoral training in epidemiology and health communication at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She has led multi-million federally funded research, and her portfolio spans oral health, mental health, women’s health, disability, infectious disease response, and violence prevention.
Outside her professional work, she loves to try different forms of art: oils, embroidery work, pottery, writing poetry and reading books.
Navjot’s work positions communication as infrastructure, not an accessory to science but the condition that determines whether science can function in society at all. She argues that health systems must move beyond information delivery toward capacity building, helping people evaluate, question, and use health knowledge independently. This philosophy shaped the creation of Health Savvy You, a platform dedicated to strengthening health, science, digital, and media literacy. Through research-driven storytelling, the initiative translates complex evidence into lived understanding while equipping audiences to interpret health information on their own terms. It reflects her central belief that real public health authority grows when communities no longer need translation to participate in decisions about their bodies and futures.