Student Spotlight: Farah Qureshi, SD ’19

Farah Qureshi is a doctoral candidate studying social epidemiology. Her research examines the interplay between young people’s social environments, emotional well-being, and cardiometabolic health. In addition to pursuing a career in research, she is passionate about teaching, and particularly exploring innovative pedagogies to improve public health education at both the graduate level as well as at the undergraduate and high school levels to foster early quantitative skills, analytic thinking, and general interest in issues of population health equity. She holds a master’s degree in child health and development from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a bachelor’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. 

Your dissertation is focused on the origins of cardiometabolic disease in children.  What led you to study this topic?

When I came to Harvard, I knew I wanted to study how social environments influence young people’s mental health, and I really thought my entire research agenda would focus on that. What I wasn’t aware of at that point though was the compelling body of work linking social inequities, mental health, and cardiovascular outcomes like heart disease and stroke. As I started to learn more about stress research and how these processes are believed to play out in older populations, it was clear to me that little is known about their early origins. Knowing what we know about how adversity can impair children’s mental health, I found myself thinking about the lasting impacts these impairments might have over the life course, and the extent to which they may possibly explain the health inequities we see at the population level. So I ended up flipping my script to think about children’s mental health as an exposure rather than my outcome of interest, and that’s what led me to cardiometabolic research!

Risk and Resilience is a subject that is quite interdisciplinary.  Did you draw on research from other fields such as psychology or education in your dissertation?

Very much so. As I see it, psychosocial research aims to explain how psychological processes serve as the interface between our experiences in society and our biology. As such it draws heavily from psychology, which is something that is definitely reflected in my dissertation. To conduct my studies, I had to learn quite a bit about developmental psychology, as well as different theories in social psych that help us understand child mental health and its social drivers.

Who did you collaborate with on this study?  

In addition to my advisor (Laura Kubzansky), I worked closely with Henning Tiemeier since two of my dissertation papers use data from the Generation R Study. Generation R is an on-going multi-ethnic birth cohort from Rotterdam that has been following ~9,000 children since fetal life and has collected extensive child psychiatric measures as well as cardiometabolic data. In my fourth year, I received the Rose Traveling Fellowship from the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, which allowed me to spend four weeks at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam during the summer of 2017. In that time, I worked with Henning to hone my research questions – some of which had to change slightly due to data availability – and I was also able to observe first hand how large-scale data collection is conducted for a huge birth cohort. Being there was also really helpful to give me a sense of the social context that serves as the backdrop for my studies. The insights I gained were invaluable and something I wouldn’t have been able to fully grasp from the data alone.

What are your career aspirations after graduating this May? 

After I graduate, I look forward to staying at HSPH for my post-doc. I plan to continue exploring the intersections between early life experiences, child/adolescent mental health, and cardiometabolic health over the life course, but plan to shift my focus more towards identifying positive resources that may buffer children against the health deteriorative effects of stress.