Brittney Butler pens op-ed: “Black mothers die at higher rates. Florida’s ‘Stop WOKE Act’ could make that worse”

Head shot of Brittney Francis

Harvard Bell Fellow Brittney Butler, PhD, who also holds a joint appointment as an FXB Health and Human Rights Research Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has penned an op-ed published in the Miami Herald in which she sounds the alarm about the potential damaging effects of the “Stop WOKE Act” (House Bill 7, or HB 7) to Black families in Florida. The bill is sitting…

First-ever dashboard displaying life expectancies on the U.S. Congressional District level

Dashboard showing life expectancy by U. S. Congressional District

Despite persistent health disparities in the United States, health data on the Congressional District level continues to be meager. “As our nation transitions towards recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and reducing health disparities, it is imperative for politically relevant public health data to be available in a clear and direct manner,” said Dr. S V  Subramanian, Harvard Pop Center faculty member and one of the leading researchers at the Geographic…

India Policy Insights designated a “Key Initiative” for the Government of India

Screen shot of Policy Tracker dashboard

India Policy Insights (IPI), the flagship project of the Geographic Insights Lab at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, has been designated as a Key Initiative of NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), the official policy design and innovation think tank for the Government for India. This partnership will allow NITI to strengthen its monitoring capacity by leveraging IPI’s online geo-visual data platform that synthesizes and visually…

Paper awarded ‘Highly Cited Trophy’ and ‘Hot Paper’ designation by Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information

Graphic from paper that shows COVID-19 inequalities by disadvantaged counties

What started as a Harvard Pop Center Working Paper, and was then published in a COVID-19 supplement in the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice, has been awarded a ‘Highly Cited Trophy’ as well as designated a ‘Hot Paper’ from Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The article in JPHMP was cited 107 times in less than one year of publication and is considered to be in the top…

Announcing the recipient of the 2022 Dillon Family Fellowship Award

Head shot of 2022 Dillon Family Fellowship Award

The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies is pleased to announce that the 2022 Dillon Family Fellowship Award recipient is Hayami Kikuchi Koga, MD, MPH. Hayami is a PhD candidate in population health sciences in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (the School), and a graduate student affiliate at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS). She holds…

Announcing the 2022 Sissela Bok Ethics and Population Research Prize Recipient

Head shot of Britta Clark

We are thrilled to announce that Harvard doctoral candidate Britta Clark has been selected as the 2022 recipient of the Sissela Bok Ethics and Population Research Prize. Clark is a doctoral student in philosophy at Harvard University. Her research interests include social and political philosophy, climate change ethics, environmental ethics, intergenerational justice, and collective responsibility. The title of her in-process dissertation is: “Intergenerational Justice in an Unjust World.” In particular,…

From Harvard Pop Center Working Paper to The New England Journal of Medicine

Logo of the The New England Journal of Medicine

We were honored to have our working paper series provide a platform for this time-sensitive article by Roby P. Bhattacharyya, MD, PhD, and William P. Hanage, PhD, on the challenges in inferring the severity of the omicron variant that is now published as a Perspective in The New England Journal of Medicine. Learn more in this press release by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Lisa Berkman on the “rectangularization” of the demographic pyramid in The Harvard Gazette

Lisa Berkman sitting in Harvard Yard with colorful chairs

With more people living longer and healthier lives, along with a simultaneous decline in fertility rates, societies are facing a challenge to adapt to this “rectangularization” of the demographic pyramid. In this piece on the increase in life expectancy and “health span” in The Harvard Gazette, Harvard Pop Center Director Lisa Berkman explains how this trend could improve our work force, and how it may be contributing to our national…

Addressing payment challenges faced by front-line health care workers in LMICs — a call for research to incentivize better patient care

A person receiving a Digitial payment via a cell phone

The conceptual model detailed in this Commentary in BMJ Global Health illustrates how payment digitation for health care workers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) could help to improve health systems, and incentivize more streamlined, effective patient care. Five of the Commentary authors are Harvard Pop Center affiliates, including former PGDA Fellow Margaret McConnell, and faculty affiliates Sebastian Bauhoff, Kevin Croke, Stéphane Verguet, and Marcia Castro.

In the news: Three inexpensive tweaks companies can make to work conditions to foster improved employee well-being

Work Design for Health logo

Researcher Erin Kelly, PhD, contributes findings from the Work and Well-Being Initiative, a Harvard and MIT collaboration, in this piece in FastCompany. Kelly highlights the practices—served up in the form of an employer toolkit on the Initiative’s website—that are based on three principles that can be applied across a spectrum of employment sectors. These principles and the toolkit itself also received a mention in the post “Protecting Employee Health in…