Sissela Bok, Senior Visiting Fellow, a writer and philosopher, received her B.A. and M.A. in psychology at the George Washington University in 1957 and 1958, and her Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1970. She was formerly a Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. The third edition of her book Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life (1978) was reissued in 1999 with a new preface. Other books include Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (1982, 1989); A Strategy for Peace: Human Values and the Threat of War (1989); Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir (1991); Common Values (1996, reissued in 2002 with a new preface); and Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (1998). With John Behnke, Bok has co-edited The Dilemmas of Euthanasia (1975) and, with Daniel Callahan, Ethics Teaching in Higher Education (1980). With Gerald Dworkin and R. G. Frey, she has co-authored Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (1998).
Rose E. Frisch, Associate Professor of Population Sciences, Emeritus, at the Department of Population and International Health, Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Frisch obtained her Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin. She is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the John S. Memorial Guggenheim Foundation, and former Sigma Xi National Lecturer from 1989-1990. Her research has shown that under-nutrition and intense physical activity can have a limiting effect on female fertility. She hypothesized that a critical, minimum amount of body fat is necessary for, and directly influences, female reproduction. Her research results are predictive and are now used clinically for evaluation of nutritional infertility and the restoration of fertility. Research on the long-term health of 5,498 U.S. college alumnae showed that moderate regular athletic activity resulted in a lower risk of breast cancer and cancers of the reproductive system and a lower risk of late onset diabetes in the menopausal years. She has shown how environmental factors of nutrition, physical activity and disease can affect each reproductive milestone from menarche to menopause. Leptin, a new protein hormone made by body fat, is a major signal to the hypothalamus. She has published numerous articles, and several books. The most recent, Female Fertility and the Body Fat Connection, University of Chicago Press, 2002, paperback 2004, covers her 35 years of research on the topic.
Heidi Larson is Associate Research Professor in the Department of International Development and Social Change at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is a Research Associate at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She obtained a B.A. in visual and environmental studies from Harvard and a M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkley. Dr. Larson specializes is analysis and evaluation of health and development programmes on a global level with particular attention to social and political factors which can affect the delivery of services. Of particular interest is the area of risk and rumour management in health programmes and technologies, especially vaccines- from clinical trials to delivery - and building public trust. Dr. Larson also is Executive Director of aids2031, a UNAIDS commissioned initiative, whose secretariat is hosted by Clark University. Aids2031 is a multi-disciplinary look at the future options for the aids response involving nine issue-specific working groups including financing, modeling, social drivers, new trends in science and technology, leadership, communication. As Executive Director, her role is to convene regular meetings of the working group heads, oversee the multiple strands of research, and lead the preparation of a final report - aids2031: An Agenda for the Future - to be launched in late 2009. Through the Harvard Pop Center, she is currently working on a book on risk and rumors in health, analyzing the experience of the Nigeria polio vaccination boycott and along with other examples of managing public questioning and rumors in public health.
Michael J. Levin is currently a Mid-Career MPA Student at the Kennedy School. His Ph.D. in Anthropology from Michigan looked at the effects of population pressure on scarce resources on a 26 acre atoll in Micronesia. He worked for 8 years in the East-West Center's Population Program and followed with 27 years at the U.S. Census Bureau. He has worked in most of the Pacific Islands countries and territories and a dozen African countries, mostly assisting statistical offices in collecting, processing, and analyzing census and survey data. He has published many articles and several books, including the UN Editing Handbook, Alaska Natives in a Century of Change, and the co-authored Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. At HCPDS, he is helping coordinate the revived census and survey training program.
