Monica Gandhi is an American physician and professor. She teaches medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and is director of the UCSF Gladstone Center for AIDS Research and the medical director of the San Francisco General Hospital HIV Clinic, Ward 86. Her research considers HIV prevalence in women, as well as HIV treatment and prevention. She has been noted as a critic of some aspects of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the US. Early life and education Gandhi was born to Indian American immigrant parents. Her father, Om P. Gandhi, was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and former department chair at the University of Utah. Her father returned to his home country of India to teach physics after he earned his doctoral degree at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. He returned to the United States in 1967, with his wife Santosh, who would work as a computer scientist at 3M. Gandhi earned her bachelor's degree in 1991 from the University of Utah. While an undergraduate, she worked in the laboratory of John S. Parkinson, where she studied the Flagellar motor switch proteins in Escherichia coli. She earned a medical degree from Harvard Medical School before completing an internship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and after residency, completed a fellowship at the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies. She earned a Master's in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, with a focus on epidemiology and biostatistics. She said that she became interested in HIV care after several of her friends came out as gay during high school and struggled with the associated stigma. Research and career HIV Gandhi has studied the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in American women. She has investigated sex differences in the management of HIV/AIDS. Gandhi has studied HIV treatment during pregnancy, with a focus on the safety of Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in women with reproductive potential. In 2017, Gandhi opened a geriatric clinic at the San Francisco General Hospital HIV Clinic, Ward 86. COVID-19 Gandhi has criticized certain aspects of COVID-19 lockdowns, especially those imposed in the San Francisco Bay area, for being blunt measures lacking in concern for individual behavioral choices, desire to be with people, and their effect on outpatient care and mental health; she has written in these regards for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other media outlets, but her views go against