Rithika Baskar is the Research Coordinator for the HEAL Together project, an NIH HEAL initiative aiming to evaluate how peer recovery coaches can improve retention in care for underserved, minority individuals with OUD, and is based in the University of Maryland Drug Treatment Center in Baltimore. In addition, she also works on data analysis for the Siyakhana-CHW R34 and Siyakhana-Peer R21 studies in Cape Town, South Africa..

Previously Rithika worked as a Research Assistant under Dr. Carla Hunter in the Cultural Heritage and Racial Identity Lab and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She worked on the ASPIRE project aiming to learn the effectiveness of community intervention programs for African American adolescents by working with local afterschool programs like DREAAM. She received a BS in Astrophysics and Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. In the future, she hopes to continue research related to health disparities in low-income and minority communities.