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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,…

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A historical approach to validating racism as a key determinant of health

David Williams standing next to granite wall at Harvard Chan School

The February 2022 issue of the journal Health Affairs takes a deeper look at racism and health. Harvard Pop Center faculty affiliate David Williams, along with co-author Ruth Enid Zambrana, contribute to this piece on how the past four decades of scholarship, along with some more recent insights, have helped to highlight why racism needs to be part of the “national discourse on racial inequities in health.”

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Which subpopulations are more susceptible to mental health issues after experiencing a disaster?

map of 2011 Great Earthquake

In this study authored by former Harvard Bell Fellow Adel Daoud, PhD, and our faculty affiliate Ichiro Kawachi, and their colleagues, a machine learning approach to parsing out differences in mental health problems after a disaster-related traumatic experience (in this case, older Japanese adults who lived in an area hard hit by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake) revealed that some subgroups experienced severe impacts. Those found to be most…

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Cohort study compares new symptoms months after testing either positive or negative for SARS-CoV-2

coronavirus

New symptoms can occur following a novel coronavirus infection, but are they occuring more than among those who tested negative for infection? This cohort study analyzed the electronic health records of hundreds of thousands of people (under age 20 and over age 20; nonhospitalized, hospitalized, and hospitalized and ventillated) who had a medical encounter between March–December, 2020; the researchers looked for new symptoms that were present 31–150 days after testing…

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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.

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From Harvard Pop Center working paper to Op-Ed: Harvard Bell Fellow pens this commentary on hiring discrimination faced by immigrants

Based on this working paper, A. Nicole Kreisberg, PhD, penned an op-ed titled “Even with green cards, immigrants face hiring discrimination based on where they were born” published in the Chicago Tribune. (Here’s a pdf of the Op-Ed.) Kreisberg shares this summary: “Recent policy proposals advocate administering more unused green cards to immigrants, largely under the premise that work rights will promote work access. But my research finds employers discriminate…

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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…

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The equalizing power of U.S. higher education for immigrant Indian women’s job prospects

Harvard Bell Fellow A. Nicole Kreisberg, PhD, and her colleague Liz Jacobs, PhD, have published their findings in International Migration which suggest that although according to the New Immigrant Survey, Indian men do better than Indian women in the U.S. job market, women with a U.S. college degree experience nearly the same occupational attainment as comparably educated Indian men.

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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.

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Retiring at a later age may require a boost in healthy life expectancy

Person walking with a cane

Working longer and later in the lifespan is more possible if it is paired with the “compression of morbidity” — a delayed onset of disability or illness. Center Director Lisa Berkman and her colleague John Rowe have published an article in Nature Aging in which they review recent findings that suggest that while life expectancy may be increasing, the period of life in which functional impairments and disabilities are experienced…

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