Call for Applications: The Sissela Bok Ethics and Population Research Prize

Head shot of Sisslea Bok

We are pleased to announce that the call for applications is now open for the Sissela Bok Ethics and Population Research Prize. The $5,000 prize will be awarded to a doctoral student, postdoctoral fellow, or full-time, untenured faculty member at Harvard who has incorporated ethical considerations into his/her population science research. The deadline to apply is Friday, December 8, 2023.            

What’s to blame for the lagging U.S life expectancy? A closer look at mid-life ‘deaths of despair’ and retirement-age chronic disease

Head shot of Leah Abrams

Recent Sloan Fellow on Aging and Work Leah Abrams, PhD, is lead author on A Brief Report published in PNAS Demography that explores what could be driving the troubling status of U.S. life expectancy which has been stagnating since 2010. Abrams and her colleagues find chronic disease at the time of retirement to be a bigger factor than the ‘deaths of despair’ (drug overdose, alcohol abuse, and suicide) that have…

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Recruiting now for interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Population Center

Collage of photos of postdoctoral fellows with Call for applications for fellowships

The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies is now accepting applications for its postdoctoral fellowship program—the David E. Bell Fellowship for the 2024–2026 cohort. We offer competitive salaries, benefits, and research/travel funds. Deadline to apply is Thursday, November 30, 2023.      

“Climate change is poised to have enduring and far-reaching consequences on the Sustainable Development Goals related to health”

Sustainable Development Goals 2030

S (Subu) V Subramanian explains in this piece in Mongabay-India  how climate change has a negative impact on India’s progress in achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. A study led by Subramanian that was published in The Lancet Regional Health Southeast Asia earlier this year that assessed India’s progress in meeting these goals is also cited in this article.

Cross and Pedulla share ASA award for their work to advance the field of family sociology

Cross and Pedulla share award for most impactful paper from ASA

HCPDS faculty members Christina Cross and David Pedulla were both recognized by the American Sociological Association (ASA) with the ASA Family Section’s 2023 Article of the Year Award for their independent journal articles published last year. Cross, a former postdoctoral fellow at HCPDS and current member of the Social Demography Seminar planning committee at the Center, was recognized for a paper that continues her previous scholarship on two-parent families by…

Decade-long research project that explores aging in South Africa receives NIH/NIA funding for new waves & national expansion, with special focus on cognitive health

HAALSI letters with images from project

Researchers from The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS), the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Cape Town have been awarded 27 million dollars from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to further the collaborative program project Health and Aging in Africa: A Longitudinal Study in South Africa (HAALSI). This is the largest grant to be administered through…

Gut check: Study deepens understanding of link between gut bacteria and emotions

Gut microbiome

HCPDS faculty member Laura Kubzansky, PhD, is a co-corresponding author of a study published in Psychological Medicine that contributes to “gut-brain axis” research by tracking over 200 women, and evaluating their self-reported feelings (as well as how they handled these emotions) along with stool samples. “The analysis found that people who suppressed their emotions had a less diverse gut microbiome. The investigators also found that people who reported happier feelings…