Mahendra Bhandari 
Advisor
Mahendra Bhandari (born 24 December 1945) is an internationally recognized academic Urologist and kidney transplant surgeon. Besides his own specialty, he has made substantial contributions in the application of information technology to the healthcare domain. He was the Founder and Vice Chancellor of MedVarsity, India’s first Virtual Medical University established by the Apollo Hospital Group in India in the year 2000. It emerged as one of the frontline global efforts to put medical education on the web. Over the past decade he has been deeply involved in robotic surgery, surgical innovation and the wider dissemination of newer surgical modalities, all part of his personal quest to improve patient outcomes.
With his in-depth knowledge of handling several large databases and data registries, coupled with a strong background in Biostatistics, he is one of the few healthcare experts well conversant with Artificial Intelligence applications related to healthcare. Currently, he is focused on development of Personalized Medicine to improve patient outcomes by building Personalized Predictive Models to predict critical events during the course of the illness of a patient. Another area of his focus is on how the application of Computer Vision and image processing can contribute to overall surgical excellence.
Dr. Bhandari was awarded the prestigious Dr. B.C. Roy award in 1996, and the Padma Shri by the government of India in 2000. After 47 years of meritorious career in India, he moved to the United States in 2006. He is currently Senior Bio-scientist and Director of Robotic Surgery Research & Education, Director of Basic Research at the Vattikuti Urology Institute (VUI) Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI and has been the CEO of the Vattikuti Foundation since 2010.
While in India, he trained in Urology at the prestigious Christian Medical College, Vellore. He has worked in senior capacities at the SMS Medical College, Jaipur; All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi (AIIMS); Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research (JIPMER), Pondicherry; Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow; and at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He was appointed as the Director of Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences for two terms and was the Vice Chancellor of King George’s Medical University, Lucknow.
Dr. Bhandari served as the President of the Urological Society of India, Indian Society of Organ Transplantation and the Asian Society of Transplantation. He founded the prestigious Indian Journal of Urology and was the first editor from 1984-1994. The Journal is a peer reviewed, indexed, open-access and widely read source of urological literature. He served on the editorial board of several prestigious journals including the British Journal of Urology. He is the founder of the Center of Biomedical Magnetic Resonance – Lucknow, India and is an Honorary Professor there.
Dr. Bhandari was awarded his MBA from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He also is a graduate in Biostatistics from the Harvard University Extension School. His “ O-1,special professional visa for persons with extraordinary ability” has been included in the exhibit “Many Voices One Nation” at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
