Events

Upcoming Events

The Lown Scholars Program holds monthly Webinars and Conversations highlighting work in community prevention of cardiovascular disease. All are welcome to join us on Zoom.

Past Events

Winter 2024 Conversation Series

January 23: Goodarz Danaei, MSc, ScD, MD

Dr. Goodarz Danaei is the Bernard Lown Professor of Cardiovascular Health and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His global health research focuses on quantifying the population-level impact of risk factors and preventive interventions on cardiovascular disease, globally with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.

Dr. Danaei chairs and directs the Bernard Lown Scholars in Cardiovascular Health Program. The program aims to train an international cadre of talented health professionals who will use public health tools and strategies to prevent cardiovascular diseases and promote cardiovascular health in developing countries.

This Q&A discussion focuses on health inequity in the United States. VIEW RECORDING

 

Fall 2023 Conversation Series

December 12: Jon Cooper, PhD, FREng, FRSE

Dr. Jon Cooper is the Wolfson Chair of Bioengineering at the University of Glasgow. His research addresses major healthcare challenges with a particular focus on medical imaging, medical diagnostics and medical devices. Dr. Cooper has also worked extensively in Eastern Africa on infectious diseases diagnostics in rural communities in Uganda and Tanzania.

This Q&A session will focus on DIDIDA, a project developing reliable, low-cost and mobile phone-connected tests to help detect multiple diseases at once in sub-Saharan Africa. Possible side discussions may focus on how DIDIDA can help to prevent rheumatic heart disease (RHD) and other cardiovascular diseases. VIEW RECORDING

 

November 22: Gene Bukhman, MD, PhD

Dr. Gene Bukhman is a cardiologist and medical anthropologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he founded the Center for Integration Science. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Global Health, and School Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he also directs the Program in NCDs and Social Change. He is a Senior Health and Policy Advisor to Partners In Health (PIH).

Dr. Bukhman is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters fostering integrated solutions for those doubly afflicted by extreme poverty and non-infectious conditions. These solutions include the Package of Essential NCD Interventions – Plus (PEN-Plus), that is now impacting the lives of people living with rheumatic heart disease, type 1 diabetes, and sickle cell disease in more than a dozen countries. Dr. Bukhman was the lead-author and co-chair of the 1996-2020 Lancet Commission on Reframing NCDs and Injuries (NCDIs) for the Poorest Billion and is co-chair of the 22-country NCDI Poverty Network. VIEW RECORDING

Spring 2023 Conversation Series

May 23, 2023: Andreas Reis, PD, MD, MSc

Andreas Alois Reis is the Co-Unit Head of the Health Ethics & Governance Unit at WHO in Geneva, Switzerland.

After medical studies and practice in internal medicine in Germany, France and Chile he pursued studies in health economics and obtained a post-graduate degree in biomedical ethics. His work focuses on ethical aspects of infectious diseases, public health surveillance, health research, and AI.

He has lectured and organized trainings for WHO in more than 50 countries and serves on the editorial boards of Public Health Ethics and Monash Bioethics Review. He has published widely and is the co-editor of four books on health ethics. VIEW RECORDING.

These are some of the articles and links mentioned during the discussion: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345925/9789240028616-eng.pdf, https://www.who.int/news/item/16-05-2023-who-calls-for-safe-and-ethical-ai-for-health, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(23)00048-1/fulltext

Here is a link to a course on the ethics of using AI in healthcare developed by WHO: https://openwho.org/courses/ethics-ai

 

May 1: Yun Liu, Google Health

Yun is a staff research scientist in Google Health. In this role he focuses on developing and validating machine learning for medical applications across multiple fields: pathology, ophthalmology, radiology, dermatology, and beyond. Yun completed his PhD at Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology, where he worked on predictive risk modeling using biomedical signals, medical text, and billing codes. He has previously also worked on predictive modeling for nucleic acid sequences and protein structures. Yun completed a B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.VIEW RECORDING

 

March 30: Andrew Beam, PhD

Andrew Beam is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with secondary appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Newborn Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His research develops and applies machine-learning methods to extract meaningful insights from clinical and biological datasets, and he is the recipient of a Pioneer Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for his work on medical artificial intelligence. VIEW RECORDING

Fall 2022 Conversation Series

November 15: Briony Swire-Thompson, PhD

Briony Swire-Thompson is the director of the Psychology of Misinformation Lab and a Senior Research Scientistat Northeastern University. Her research investigates what drives belief in inaccurate information and how corrections can be designed to maximize impact. She was a doctoral student at the University of Western Australia’s Cognitive Science Laboratories and her 2017 doctoral thesis was The Role of Memory and Ideological Biases in the Correction of Misinformation. She originally came to Boston thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. VIEW RECORDING

October 19: Dr. K. “Vish” Viswanath, PhD

Dr. K. “Vish” Viswanath is Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and in the McGraw-Patterson Center for Population Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). He is also the Faculty Director of the Health Communication Core of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC). Dr. Viswanath’s work, drawing from literatures in communication science, social epidemiology, and social and health behavior sciences, focuses on translational communication science to influence public health policy and practice. His primary research is in documenting the relationship between communication inequalities, poverty and health disparities, and knowledge translation to address health disparities. He has served and continuing to serve on several national committees including for the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). VIEW RECORDING

September 20: Dr. Daniel Wikler, PhD

Dr. Daniel Wikler is the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Ethics and Population Health at HSPH. His current research interests are ethical issues in population and global health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, ethical dilemmas arising in public health practice, and ethical dimensions of global tobacco control policy. He served as the first Staff Ethicist for the World Health Organization and served as Staff Philosopher for the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Dr. Wikler was co-founder and second president of the International Association of Bioethics and serves as faculty associate to a number of Harvard programs, including the Harvard Ph.D. Program in Health Policy; the Safra Center for Ethics; and Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics. He discusses misinformation and disinformation as a now-serious public health issue. VIEW RECORDING

Spring 2022 Webinar Series

April 19: Dr. Foluso Fakorede, MD

Dr. Foluso Fakorede, physician and advocate for healthcare injustice, spent his formative years in Nigeria and immigrated to America as a teenager. Dr. Fakorede serves on the Society of Cardiac Angiography and Intervention Vascular Disease Committee and is Co-chair of the Association of Black Cardiologists’ PAD initiative. He is also a member of the American Heart Association Patient Advocacy Group. In 2015, Dr. Fakorede answered a calling to educate and provide access to quality care for all by starting his practice, Cardiovascular Solutions of Central MS, P.A and Fusion Vascular LLC. Dr. Fakorede has become a national voice on the impact of health disparity in underserved communities. He has established partnerships with key multiple stakeholders to facilitate cardiovascular education, promote nutrition coaching, highlight social determinants of health, improve access to quality care and engender trust in underserved communities. VIEW RECORDING

Winter 2021/2 Webinar Series

March 15: Olga Lucia Sarmiento Dueñas, MPH, MD, PhD

Dr. Olga Lucia Sarmiento Dueñas is a Professor of the Department of Public Health at the School of Medicine at Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia). Her current research interests include physical activity, nutrition and built environment among the populations of children and adults in Latin America. She is currently working in the IPEN Network (International Physical Activity and Environment Network), the evaluation of the effectiveness of the Recreovia Program for the promotion of physical activity in community settings, the Challenge Score for evaluating the Ciclovías Recreativas of the Americas and The International Study of Childhood Obesity, Lifestyle and the Environment (ISCOLE). Currently, she is the director of the Group of Epidemiology at the Universidad de los Andes. VIEW RECORDING

January 18: Cristina Rabadán-Diehl, MPH, PharmD, PhD

Dr. Cristina Rabadán-Diehl is a multidisciplinary scientist with over 30 years of experience working in academia, government, and the private sector. She spent more than 20 years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an intramural scientist and program administrator, managing scientific and global cardiovascular health programs and directing the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Office of Global Health. Dr. Rabadan-Diehl played key roles in advancing U.S. government health priorities around the world by levering her technical and policy knowledge and interacting with many stakeholders including scientists and Ministers of Health.  Currently, she is an Associate Director for Clinical Trials at Westat and the Principal Investigator of a clinical trial sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. She is also an Adjunct Professor and the Director of the Global Health Diplomacy course at George Washington University. VIEW RECORDING

Fall 2021 Webinar Series

November 15: Jon Rohde, MD

Dr. Jon Rohde discusses his experience in developing and implementing simple technologies for disease prevention and diving into what this experience means for new types of “simple” technologies, such as mHealth. Dr. Rohde is an international public health consultant and the former Chief of Party with Management Sciences for Health of the South Africa EQUITY project and Haiti Rural Health System. He is also a former representative of UNICEF India and has served as a mentor to countless Lown Scholars throughout the Program’s history. VIEW RECORDING

October 19: Adolfo Rubinstein, MD

Dr. Rubinstein is a Lown Scholar, the founder and former Director General of the Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy (IECS), and former Director of the Master’s program in Clinical Effectiveness of the University of Buenos Aires.  His research focuses on cardiovascular and NCD epidemiology as well as implementation research to improve prevention and control of cardiovascular disease and cardio-metabolic risk factors in Argentina and Latin America. In this webinar, Dr. Rubinstein answers questions regarding the science to policy process; in essence, in what ways is the policymaking process attuned to use scientific evidence? VIEW RECORDING

September 21: Heidi Behforouz, MD

Dr. Behforouz is a physician leader, consultant, and clinician who has focused her career on the health issues of vulnerable populations. She is currently Medical Director of Housing for Health (HFH) at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (LAC DHS), the second largest safety net provider in the United States. Here, she oversees the county’s clinical initiatives to improve the health and wellness of the largest homeless population in the country. She is a board-certified internist who trained at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She currently practices primary care at the STAR clinic in Skid Row, Los Angeles. In this webinar, Dr. Behforouz discusses community-oriented primary care, community organizing, and the employment of community health workers to improve quality of care and reduce disparities among high-need populations. VIEW RECORDING.

September 29: Dr. Lown’s Portrait Unveiling

View recording on YouTube.
On September 29, World Heart Day, friends and colleagues came together virtually to honor Dr. Lown’s centennial in a portrait unveiling ceremony.​ Remarks were provided by​

• Jane Kim, Dean for Academic Affairs and K.T. Li Professor of Health Economics; ​
• Vikas Saini, President, Lown Institute; ​
• Marcia Castro, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population and Andelot Professor of Demography; and ​
• Goodarz Danaei, Faculty Director and Bernard Lown Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Health.

Summer 2021 Webinar Series

June 15: Andrew Moran, MD, MPH

Dr. Moran is Director, Global Hypertension Control, at Resolve to Save Lives where he supports expansion of systematic hypertension control programs in 12 low and middle income countries. In this role he provides clinical, technical, and logistics support to Resolve to Save Lives country hypertension control programs. At Columbia University, Dr. Moran leads predictive modeling and economic analyses of major clinical trials, including the landmark SPRINT trial of intensive blood pressure treatment, and the Los Angeles Barber-Pharmacist blood pressure lowering trial, which tested a barber-pharmacist collaboration to treat hypertension in African American men visiting barbershops in Los Angeles, California. In this webinar, Dr. Moran discusses his work at Resolve to Save Lives. VIEW RECORDING

Spring 2021 Webinar Series

May 18: Kazem Rahimi, MSc, DM

Kazem Rahimi is a cardiologist and epidemiologist currently serving as Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Population Health, University of Oxford; Director, Blood Pressure Lowering Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration (BPLTTC); Director, Deep Medicine programme, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford; Cardiology Specialist Consulting Editor at PLOS Medicine; and an Associate Editor of the BMJ Heart. In this webinar, titled “Is it time to put blood pressure lowering treatment in the water?”, Dr. Rahimi provides a brief overview of research into our understanding of the relationship between elevated blood pressure and risk of cardiovascular disease. VIEW RECORDING

April 20: David Bor, MD

David H. Bor is the Charles S Davidson Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Chief Academic Officer and emeritus Chief of Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA). His leadership contributed to the expansion of the city hospital into five cities north of Boston, innovations in medical education including the Harvard-Cambridge Integrated Clerkship, expansion of health policy research and the advent of the Institute for Community Health. He has received numerous awards at Harvard for community service, mentoring, teaching and promotion of women faculty. In this webinar, Dr. Bor presents on “Cambridge Health Alliance: A public hospital’s recent evolution and response to COVID.” VIEW RECORDING | DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPT

March 16: Stephane Verguet, MS, MPP, PhD

Stéphane Verguet is an Assistant Professor of Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Population and a core faculty member of the Center for Health Decision Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In this webinar, we discuss financial risk protection (e.g. prevention of impoverishment from illness-related financial consequences like out-of-pocket payments for health care) and the enhancement of equity (e.g. equalization of health among individuals in a given population) which are two objectives of health systems. We discuss how to explicitly include such objectives in health economic evaluations and priority settings. VIEW RECORDING

February 16: Bin Zhou, MD, PhD

Dr. Bin Zhou is a Research Associate from School of Public Health, Imperial College London. He has a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from Imperial College London and he is working in the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), a global network of health scientists that provides rigorous and timely data on risk factors for NCDs worldwide. The Collaboration works closely with the World Health Organization (WHO), and currently has data from over 3,300 population-based surveys from 195 countries since the 1950s, with over 190 million participants whose risk factor levels have been measured. The Collaboration has produced high-impact scientific journal articles, garnering international media coverage.

January 19: Farshad Farzadfar, MD, MPH, MHS, D.Sc.

Dr. Farzadfar is Director of the Non-Communicable Diseases Research Center (NCDRC) at the Tehran University Medical School. He established this center with the aim to produce evidence on the health status of populations at national and subnational levels, evaluate national health interventions, and assess efficacy and effectiveness of innovative health interventions. During the past consecutive five years, NCDRC was awarded the national first rank research center. For this webinar, Dr. Farzadfar will discuss “The CVDs prevalence in the Covid-19 national registry” in Iran.

Fall 2020 Webinar Series

 December 15: Alfa Muhihi, MD, MPH 

Dr. Alfa Muhihi served as a clinical trial coordinator at Africa Academy for Public Health (AAPH) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. His research focuses on community-based approaches for prevention of cardiovascular disease risk factors. He is particularly interested in simple, culturally acceptable community-based methods for health education, such as screening for early identification and referral of community members at high risk for cardiovascular diseases.  This webinar will focus on findings of a recently completed study “Assessing effects of community health worker interventions for reduction of blood pressure among adults in Morogoro, Tanzania”              VIEW RECORDING

 

November 17:  Dorairaj Prabhakaran, MD, MSc 

Professor D. Prabhakaran is a cardiologist and epidemiologist by training. He is an internationally renowned researcher and is currently the Vice President of Research & Policy at the Public Health Foundation of India, Professor of Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and is Chair of the Science Committee of the World Heart Federation.  This webinar will focus on low cost solutions for cardiovascular disease in LMICs.               VIEW RECORDING 

 

October 20: Farin Kamangar, MD, PhD 

Dr. Farin Kamangar is a University Distinguished Professor at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. He is an epidemiologist and serves as one of the principal investigators of the Golestan Cohort Study, a long-term prospective study of over 50,0000 individuals.  This webinar will focus on the prevention of cardiovascular diseases using a fixed-dose combination therapy.             VIEW RECORDING

 

 

September 23: Jaime Miranda, MD, MSc, PhD, FFPH

Jaime Miranda is Research Professor at the Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, and Director of the CRONICAS Center of Excellence in Chronic Diseases, both at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH) in Lima, Peru. With over 300 peer-reviewed publications, his work brings together epidemiological and health policy aspects of chronic non-communicable diseases in low- and middle-income countries with an emphasis on obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and mental health.     This webinar will focus on the trial “Launching a Salt Substitute to Reduce Blood Pressure at the Population Level – Peru“.        VIEW RECORDING

 

2020 Summer Seminar Series

June 24: Mushtaque Chowdhury PhD, MSc 

Dr. Mushtaque Chowdhury is the Vice Chairperson of BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), as well as a professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. Dr. Chowdhury is also the founding Dean of BRAC University’s James P. Grant School of Public Health in Bangladesh, as well as founded the Research and Evaluation Division of BRAC.  This seminar will focus on BRAC’s experience with community health workers and non-communicable diseases.     VIEW RECORDING

 

June 17: Rajani Ved, MBBS, MPH  

Rajani R. Ved is currently Executive Director of National Health Systems Resource Center, a technical assistance agency that supports health systems strengthening at central and state government levels.  She plays a key role in developing and providing implementation support to India’s Comprehensive Primary Health Care effort.  Dr. Ved has also been a Visiting Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health through the Lown Scholar Program since 2016.  This seminar will focus on Dr. Ved’s experience with community health workers and non-communicable diseases, and will be hosted by Richard Cash, senior lecturer on Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.     VIEW RECORDING

 

June 10: David Bor, MD 

Dr. David Bor is Chief Academic Officer at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) and the Charles S. Davidson Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Since joining CHA in 1981, he has made major contributions to CHA as a clinician, teacher, and administrative leader. This included advancing patient care by spearheading new programs for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and community-based primary care. This seminar will focus on Dr. Bor’s experience with the Cambridge Health Alliance, which he envisions as a national model for integrated public health and health care and for medical education innovation.    VIEW RECORDING

 

June 3: Jesse Bump, PhD, MPH 

Jesse B. Bump is Executive Director of the Takemi Program in International Health and Lecturer on Global Health Policy in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a Member of the Bergen Center for Ethics and Priority Setting at the University of Bergen. This seminar will look at the politics of prevention with a focus on cardiovascular disease and primary healthcare.     VIEW RECORDING