Marcia Castro—an expert who draws on statistical models, satellite images, and field research to understand the spread and impact of malaria and other infectious diseases—was profiled in the February 2019 issue of the Brazilian magazine Piaui.
Castro is Andelot Professor of Demography and chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The Piaui article described Castro’s work in western Brazil to track malaria-carrying mosquitoes, document malaria cases in the local population, and target mosquito breeding sites for larvicide applications.
Castro told Piaui that dealing with a public health problem such as malaria requires a multidisciplinary approach that considers environmental factors as well as the socioeconomic characteristics of the affected population. “It’s complicated as hell,” she said. “But if it were easy, someone else would already have done it.”
Read the profile of Castro in Piaui: Malaria in her sights: A Brazilian demographer at Harvard hunts for Anopheles in Amazonia