Dr. Arina Cadariu is a physician, educator, and public health expert with more than 30 years of experience spanning academic medicine, high-acuity inpatient care, public health leadership, and translational systems work. She founded Health In Context as a space for scientific integrity, narrative precision, and biologically grounded education, outside the noise of clinical commodification, consumer trends, and flattening metrics.
Born and trained across systems, Dr. Cadariu’s work is shaped by lived and professional experience with complexity. After defecting from communist Romania in her early twenties, she rebuilt a life and career through medical education in Germany, postgraduate training at Yale, and years of leadership in teaching hospitals and health institutions across the U.S. and Europe.
She completed her internal medicine residency and chief residency at the Yale School of Medicine, followed by a fellowship in ambulatory care at the Yale-affiliated VA. She holds a Master of Public Health in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Yale and an MD from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. Additional post-graduate training includes Structural Acupuncture at Harvard, Epigenetics at Stanford, and European certification in lipidology.
She spent more than two decades teaching at Yale as an Assistant Clinical Professor, mentoring medical students and residents in clinical reasoning, decision-making under uncertainty, and whole-person care. Throughout her academic and clinical work, her emphasis has remained consistent: clarity, context, and responsibility — even when protocols fall short or evidence is incomplete.
Her practice now focuses on education, consulting, and systems-level insight. She works independently, offering strategic guidance and translational expertise to organizations building with integrity across health, science, and design. Her clients include public health institutions, healthcare leaders and providers, legal teams, and professionals developing frameworks that require scientific rigor without clinical overreach.
Her narrative project, The Science of Letting Go, explores biological rhythms, behavior, and moral agency in health communication, resisting the collapse of nuance under optimization culture.
She is also the founder of The Context Bus Project, a nonprofit initiative delivering immersive health literacy workshops in underserved communities across the U.S. Through this and all her work, her orientation remains the same: restore coherence, elevate agency, and never substitute metrics for meaning.
Dr. Cadariu's work is about agency with intention. About restoring trust — in data, in design, in people themselves.