Hi, I’m Vinu.

I’ve spent my career working alongside communities to transform the systems that shape our health. But again and again, I saw something missing from the conversation: the outsized influence of corporations — and the quiet, calculated ways they engineer harm while blaming the rest of us.

We’re told to eat better, exercise more, try harder. 

Meanwhile, corporations pollute our neighborhoods, flood our diets with harmful products, underpay our workers, and lobby to keep it all in place. And when we get sick, they tell us it’s our fault.

As a public health lecturer, writer, and former policy consultant with George Washington University’s Center on Commercial Determinants of Health, I’ve spent years researching how corporate power shows up in every corner of our lives, from the food we eat to the air we breathe to the policies that govern our communities. I’ve co-authored a chapter in the first textbook on this topic and had my writing featured in the New York Times, Harvard Public Health Review, and the Handbook on the Political Economy of Health Systems, publishing work on public-private partnerships, lobbying, and corporate social responsibility.

But research and writing aren’t enough. I want to help communities not just understand these forces — but organize to change them.

Before launching GASLIT, I worked on the ground: coordinating Virginia’s statewide bullying prevention program, evaluating the national truth anti-smoking campaign, and managing policy projects at Trust for America’s Health. Through this work, I saw firsthand how policies — and the corporate power behind them — shape health long before anyone enters a clinic.

I started PoP Health, my public health consulting practice, to help communities transform these policies and systems.

And now, I’ve created GASLIT to shift the narrative, build civic muscle, and reclaim the power that’s been stripped from our communities.

Because if we’re going to transform health, we have to transform power. And no one can do that alone.

This isn’t a partisan fight. Right, left, or center — for too long, corporations have won while communities have lost. The game is rigged. But together, we can unrig it.

I hold a Doctor of Public Health from George Washington University, a Master’s from Harvard, and degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Economics from the University of Virginia. I’m also a parent, a neighbor, and a voter — because this fight is personal, and it’s all of ours.

Let’s do this. Together. 

My public health consulting practice’s story space for kids at an annual health event we co-organize in our community.