Tamar Chukrun is a third-year medical student at Duke University School of Medicine in the Primary Care Leadership Track and second-year MBA student at the Duke Fuqua School of Business. Her primary interests lie in housing and health, psychiatry integration into primary care, payment innovation, and social drivers of health (SDOH) payment models. In 2019, she founded the WellNest Housing Support Program, which supports community members transitioning out of homelessness by providing furniture, hands-on moving support, and social support in the peri-move-in period. She was awarded the A. C. Reid Schweitzer Fellowship for her work and has served as the program director for WellNest since 2021.
Chukrun is also the current president of Root Causes, an innovation hub for student-led programs addressing SDOH. Root Causes supports multiple programs in the Durham, North Carolina, community, including WellNest, community gardening initiatives, and at-home produce delivery to food insecure patients referred by health care providers.
Prior to medical school, Chukrun worked as a housing specialist at Community Empowerment Fund, where she supported local community members in their searches for and transitions into stable housing.