This series features current research of members and affiliates of GHP. The intent is to educate and raise the awareness of our community and beyond, about the research activities presently being conducted by faculty, students, researchers, and special guests of the department.
Seminars are held every Thursday from 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET.
Speakers’ remarks are based on their own scholarship and experience. As such, they speak for themselves, not for Harvard.
Brown Bag Seminars will be hosted online via Zoom only or in hybrid format in Building 1, Room 1208. To attend a hybrid seminar in-person, a Harvard ID is required to access the building.
For questions, please contact Jessica Majano jmajanoguevara@hsph.harvard.edu.
Spring 2024 Seminars
Thursday, February 8, 2024
Zoom recording
Factors Contributing to Disaster Resilience in the Philippines
Featuring Vincenzo Bollettino, PhD, Director of the Program on Resilient Communities at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Dr. Bollettino is the Director of Resilient Communities Program at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He also leads HHI’s engagement in the National NGO Program on Humanitarian Leadership. Prior to his current academic appointment, Dr. Bollettino served for five years as Executive Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Dr. Bollettino has twenty-five years of professional and academic experience in disaster preparedness and resilience, civil-military engagement in emergencies, and humanitarian leadership. He has spent that past eighteen years of his career at Harvard University in research, teaching, and administration. His current research focuses on civil military engagement during humanitarian emergencies, disaster preparedness and resilience, the professionalization of the humanitarian aid field and humanitarian leadership.
Thursday, February 15, 2024 – No seminar
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Zoom recording
A Primary Health Care-based Approach to Migrant Health Rights: A Qualitative Study from Colombia
Featuring Stefano Angeleri, PhD, Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast; Visiting Scientist at FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University
Stefano Angeleri is an EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University Belfast and Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá. Currently he is a visiting scientist at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Alongside academic work on human rights law, health and social rights, migration and international law, he has collaborated on research and training projects with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Jesuit Refugee Service, Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), Doctors of the World and the Italian NGO Naga. Recent publications include the monograph “Irregular Migrants and the Right to Health” (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and “Parsing human rights, promoting health equity: reflections on Colombia’s response to Venezuelan migration,” Medical Law Review, Volume 31, Issue 2, Spring 2023, Pages 187–204, https://doi.org/10.1093/medlaw/fwac053 (with Thérèse Murphy).
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Zoom recording
Trajectories of Risk: Early Marriage among Adolescent Girls in Displacement
Featuring Sawsan Abdulrahim, PhD, MPH, Palestine Program Health & Human Rights Fellow at FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University
Sawsan Abdulrahim’s work centers human rights principles to illuminate and act upon social inequities in health across the life course, with a focus on refugee populations and labor migrants in the Arab region and beyond. She is the lead author of the Arab Watch Report 2023 on the Right to Health, a live document intended to inform policy and advocacy efforts toward achieving health for all in the Arab region. Her substantive research areas include migration and health; the syndemic of early marriage and mental distress in forced displacement; and aging and the wellbeing of women migrant care workers. She obtained her doctoral degree from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is currently Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut where she teaches courses on health promotion theory, social epidemiology, and forced migration.
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Zoom recording
The impact of Violence on Community Health Workers/Agents in Brazil: Policy Implications
Featuring Anya P G F Vieira Meyer, DDS, MSc, PhD, Senior Researcher at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz – Brazil; Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University
Anya P G F Vieira Meyer is a researcher at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz Ceará and a professor at Centro Universitário Christus. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and a MSC from the University of London. She was a visiting Scholar at the University of California Berkeley in 2015/2016. Her work mainly focusses on the assessment of knowledge, practices, care and health conditions of people in risk groups (HIV, children, elders, patients with special needs, Conditional Cash Transfer beneficiaries, etc.); evaluate health services in the area of primary care – from the perspective of users, health professionals and managers; as well as the impact of public policies, such as conditional cash transfer, on the health of the population. Currently she is evaluating the reverberance of urban violence and Covid-19 on health professionals, especially Community Health Workers, mental health and work process in several scenarios in Brazil.
This seminar is co-sponsored by Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS).
Thursday, March 28, 2024 – No seminar
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Zoom recording
Empowering Healthier Communities: How Health Promotion Research Can Advance the Philippines’ Universal Health Care Journey
Featuring Katherine Ann V. Reyes, MD, MPP, LEAD fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Dr. Katherine Ann Reyes is a licensed Philippine physician and holds a Master of Public Policy from the National University of Singapore. She was recently appointed Program Lead to establish the Institute of Health Promotion at the National Institutes of Health University of the Philippines Manila, a key component in the implementation of the country’s UHC Law. She co-founded the Alliance for Improving Health Outcomes (AIHO), a local non-profit public health organization that has worked to improve opportunities for aspiring professionals in their field. She served as an inaugural member of the Philippine Health Technology Assessment Council and the UP Manila Committee of Research Integrity. She was also the first Board Member for the Western Pacific Region at Health Systems Global, where she helped to formalize the society’s expansion work in the region. Further, Dr. Reyes is a founding member of the Philippine Society of Public Health Physicians and a co-convener of Women in Global Health Philippines. In recognition of her work, Dr. Reyes was awarded the Gawad Lagablab for Social Upliftment by the Philippine Science High School National Alumni Association in 2021.
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Zoom recording
ALL IN: Wellbeing First for Healthcare
Featuring J. Corey Feist, JD, MBA, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation
J. Corey Feist, JD, MBA is a healthcare executive with over 20 years of experience. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation and Corey recently served as the CEO of the University of Virginia Physicians Group, the medical group practice of UVA Health composed of 1200+ physicians and advanced practice providers. Corey has authored numerous publications on the need to support the well-being of the healthcare workforce. He has served as an expert in multiple forums including as a keynote speaker, panelist, and moderator as well as provided formal testimony in the United States Congress. His advocacy efforts resulted in the first federal law focused on improving health worker well-being, Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act. In 2023, Corey and his wife, Jennifer, were both awarded the Surgeon General’s Medallion for Health, the highest honor the US Surgeon General can present to civilians, for their efforts at the Foundation.
Corey holds an adjunct faculty appointment at the UVA Darden School of Business. He is also the past Chair of the Board of the Charlottesville Free Clinic. Corey holds his Masters in Business Administration from the UVA Darden School of Business, his Juris Doctorate from Penn State Dickinson School of Law and his Bachelor’s degree from Hamilton College.
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Zoom recording
Presentation slides
UNICEF’s Mental Health Acceleration Initiative: Scaling up & Scaling Deep Evidence-based Child, Adolescent and Caregiver Mental Health and Psychosocial Support
Featuring Zeinab Hijazi, MSc, PsyD, Global Lead on Mental Health at UNICEF Headquarters, New York
Dr. Zeinab Hijazi has over 17 years of experience supporting mental health and psychosocial programs globally across UNICEF’s 7 regions of operation. She provides program guidance and technical support across sectors and divisions to enhance UNICEF’s multi-sectoral approach to the provision of mental health & psychosocial support for children and families in humanitarian and development settings, this includes policy, data, research, innovations & advocacy work at UNICEF headquarters, and supporting coordination across sectors of health, education, and child protection to aid UNICEF country teams and partners in designing and implementing locally relevant, comprehensive and sustainable MHPSS strategies.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Via Zoom
‘I was obligated to accept’: Coercion and autonomy in global family planning programs 30 years after Cairo
Featuring Leigh Senderowicz, ScD, MPH, Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Leigh Senderowicz (she/her) is a public health researcher and feminist social demographer focusing on global sexual and reproductive health and rights, race, gender, and coloniality. Her mixed-methods research focuses on contraceptive autonomy, exploring the ways that new approaches to measurement and evaluation can promote person-centered care, health equity and reproductive freedom.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
(Hybrid) Building 1, Room 1208 and via Zoom
It Takes a Village: A Pilot Study Encouraging Women to Use Maternal Care through Community Involvement
Featuring Aleksandra Jakubowski, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Sciences and the Department of Economics at Northeastern University.
Dr. Jakubowski’s research lies at the intersection of health economics and public policy. She designs field experiments and uses secondary data to investigate global health inequalities, with a focus on low- and middle- income countries. She works on multidisciplinary teams and in close partnership with communities and policy makers to ensure that her research is contextualized to the local setting. Dr. Jakubowski’s work examines the complex relationship between health and socio-economic status: what is the impact of public policies on health and economic functioning of households? and what are the social and individual drivers of healthcare decisions?
Past Seminars
Visit our event archives to watch previous seminar recordings.
