HCPDS working paper informs The Nation’s piece “Republicans Are Hazardous to Your Health”

An HCPDS working paper (Volume 24, No. 1) by Nancy Krieger et al. caught the attention of a reporter for The Nation who was curious about how our votes may affect our health. Although the study is descriptive (“it doesn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship between a state’s politics and health outcomes”) it does reinforce other emerging literature on the “political determinants of health.”

It’s National Postdoc Appreciation Week!

Hiram presenting at SDS

We’re so fortunate to have six wonderful postdocs sitting with us this year and immersed in our Pop Center community. We are also lucky to have former Bell Fellow Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez sit with us as a visiting scientist this year. Hiram kicked off our Social Demography Seminar series yesterday to cap off an exciting week of programming at the Pop Center!

Darina Bassil selected for new APC fellowship

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Congratulations to Darina Bassil, Pop Center research scientist, who was selected for the inaugural cohort of the Association of Population Center (APC) Fellowship program for 2024–2025. Darina is project director of the HAALSI Dementia Study (HAALSI-HCAP) and is responsible for overseeing study data collection, management and analysis, as well as managing the cognitive components of the HAALSA project. She holds a PhD in public health from Imperial College London, and…

Announcing the 2024 Dillon Family Fellowship Award recipients

Head shot of Guo and Javadi

Congratulations to Harvard Pop Center graduate student affiliates Muqi Guo and Dena Javadi on being named the recipients of the Dillon Family Fellowship Award. This long-standing monetary award was created to benefit graduate students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Muqi Guo is a PhD candidate in population health sciences in the Department of Global Health & Population. Her dissertation is entitled “Reproductive Health and Women’s Well-being…

Exploring the link between an optimistic attitude and physical functioning as women age

Bell Fellow Hayami Koga, along with Harvard Pop Center faculty members David Williams and Laura Kubzansky and their colleagues, have published a study in JAMA Psychiatry on the association between optimism and physical functioning among older women finding higher levels of optimism to be linked with better performance at baseline (grip strength and standing mobility) and slower rates of decline in several measures over a six-year period. Read about their…

INTRODUCING our 2024–2026 cohort of Bell Postdoctoral Fellows!

Two head shots

We’re thrilled to announce that two new Bell Fellows have been selected from a competitive pool of applicants and will be joining us this coming fall! Kate Beach will complete her PhD in geography & environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has trained in health geography, spatial epidemiology, and population science at the Carolina Population Center. Beach’s work focuses on the links between health…

Three “Conversations” that tell the story of health and aging in rural South Africa

HAALSA letters with South African images behind them

Physicians, professors and research scientists affiliated with Health and Aging in Africa: Longitudinal Studies in South Africa (HAALSA)—the ten-year (and counting) project that has been following a cohort that started as 5,000 men and women aged 40 and over—have penned three pieces in The Conversation that delve into unique aspects of this burgeoning population: Pioneering researchers Stephen Tollman and Kathleen Kahn from the University of the Witwatersrand reflect back on…

Featured: Graduate Student Affiliate Jen Cruz’s work on breast cancer inequities in rural settings

The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health features the research of our Graduate Student Affiliate Jen Cruz in this news piece…She returns to her small, rural hometown in Washington state to parse out the the differences between rural environments, and how these differences play a role in breast cancer screenings.