We are pleased to announce that after an extensive and competitive recruitment process, three exceptional scholars will be joining the Harvard Pop Center community as Bell Fellows this coming fall (2021–2023).
Brittney Butler’s research investigates anti-Black structural racism as a risk factor for Pregnancy Induced Hypertensive Disorders (PIHDs) among Black women. During her fellowship, she plans to build on her work by exploring neighborhood-level determinants and will incorporate new theoretical frameworks and empirical methods through didactic training and interdisciplinary faculty collaborations. Brittney will hold a dual appointment both as a Harvard Bell Fellow and as an FXB Health and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She holds an MPH from Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently completing her doctorate in epidemiology at The Ohio State University.
Aashish Gupta is a demographer whose research uses demographic and field methods to examine interrelations between health, environment, and inequality in developing countries. His research is motivated by three related questions: what are the causes and consequences of environmental health exposures; why is health distributed unequally; and how can we improve the measurement of population health? As a Harvard Bell Fellow, Aashish will investigate the reliability of civil registration systems and survey-based approaches to measure mortality across the life course. He will also explore the long-term persistence of health deficits and disparities in India. Currently, Aashish is completing his doctorate in demography and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Andrew Wooyoung Kim is an anthropologist interested in the biological, cultural, and psychiatric effects of intergenerational trauma. His current research explores how the effects of maternal stress and trauma exposure during pregnancy under South African apartheid shape human development, biology, and health both across the lifecourse and intergenerationally. As a Harvard Bell Fellow, Andy plans to pursue three new research areas: specifically, the biological mechanisms that underlie the intergenerational transmission of racial trauma and its long-term effects; the potential reversibility of past trauma through culturally relevant social interventions; and an ethnography of the public psychiatric care system during the COVID-19 pandemic in Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a PhD in biological anthropology from Northwestern University, and currently serves as an honorary lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and as a research fellow at the Chester M. Pierce Division of Global Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.