Meghan Zacher is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC) and Data Science Initiative (DSI). Her research focuses broadly on health and health disparities, particularly with respect to education and sex/gender. Much of her work adopts a biosocial perspective and explores health as the result of complex interactions between biological and social or contextual factors over the life course. Her work can be found in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Public Health, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and elsewhere.
Kate Burrows is a Voss Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute at Brown University for Environment and Society. She studies environmental epidemiology and the relationship between climate- and weather-related disasters and health. Kate is particularly interested in population mobility following disaster exposure and her dissertation work focused on landslide-related displacement and health in Indonesia. Kate is trained in mixed-methods research approaches and conducts qualitative research at the local level and quantitative research using large data at the national-level. Prior to beginning at Brown, Kate completed her PhD at Yale’s School of the Environment (formerly: Forestry & Environmental Studies) and her MPH at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
David Abramson is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s School of Global Public Health and the director of the research program on Population Impact, Recovery and Resilience (PiR2). His research employs a social ecological framework to examine the health consequences of disasters, individual and community resilience, and long-term recovery from acute collective stressors. His work has focused on population health consequences, interactions of complex systems, and risk communication strategies associated with hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the Joplin tornado, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, H1N1, and Zika, among other natural, technological, and man-made disasters. Before joining NYU’s faculty, Dr. Abramson was the Deputy Director at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute. He has his PhD in Sociomedical Sciences and Political Science and his MPH in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia and his BA in English from Queens College.
Mark VanLandingham is the Thomas C. Keller Professor at Tulane University. Dr. VanLandingham directs Tulane’s Center for Studies of Displaced Populations (CSDP). He currently leads teams focusing on rural-to-urban migration within Southeast Asia; disaster recovery; and acculturation, health and well-being among Vietnamese immigrants in the United States. His recent book, Weathering Katrina, focuses on these latter two topics. He received his PhD in Sociology from Princeton, his MPH in Population Planning and International Health from the University of Michigan, and his BA in Biology and Psychology from Mercer University.
Alina Schnake-Mahl ScD, MPH, is a social epidemiologist and health services researcher working with Usama Bilal, MD, PhD, MPH, as a postdoctoral research fellow at Drexel University. She received her masters and doctorate from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, both in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Before joining the UHC, she led evaluation and care model research at Cityblock Health. She has also worked in participatory action research, community health needs assessments, and predictive modeling for adult hospital outcomes. Her main research interests are the roles of geographic, social, and institutional contexts on health and health disparities.
Bryn Spielvogel currently works as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Utah, where she does research on out-of-school learning contexts, particularly summer camps. Her research is broadly focused on how the contexts that people live in and interact with shape their development and wellbeing. She seeks to understand how inequities show up in these contexts, and how they can be transformed to disrupt social stratification and support youth, family, and community wellbeing. She received her PhD in Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology from Boston College and her BA in Psychology from Penn State.
Jordan Smoller is a psychiatrist, epidemiologist and geneticist whose research focus has been understanding the genetic and environmental determinants of psychiatric disorders across the lifespan and using big data to advance precision mental health including improved methods to reduce risk and enhance resilience. Dr. Smoller is the Massachusetts General Hospital Trustees Endowed Chair in Psychiatric Neuroscience, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Associate Chief for Research in the Mass General Department of Psychiatry, Director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry, and Director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit in the Mass General Center for Genomic Medicine. Dr. Smoller is a Tepper Family MGH Research Scholar and also serves as Director of the Omics Unit of the Mass General Division of Clinical Research and Co-Director of the Mass General Brigham Biobank at Mass General. He is also Director of the Mass General Brigham (T32) Training Program in Precision and Genomic Medicine, an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, co-Chair of the Cross-Disorder Workgroup of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, and President of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics. Dr. Smoller is also co-Chair of the MGH Suicide Think Tank, co-Chair of the Mass General Brigham Systems Behavioral and Mental Health Suicide Prevention Task Force. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School.
Subu Subramanian is a Professor of Population Health and Geography at Harvard University, and chair of the Faculty Advisory Group for the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. He is a Primary Faculty in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a Core Faculty of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Sociology. He is also an Honorary Senior Fellow of the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog, Government of India and the PI of the Geographic Insights Lab. Subramanian was the Founding Director of Graduate Studies for the interdisciplinary PhD program in Population Health Sciences at Harvard. He received his under- and post-graduate training at the University of Delhi, and completed his PhD in geography at the University of Portsmouth. He has published over 700 articles, book chapters, and books in the broad field of population health and well-being and in applied multilevel statistical methods. His current research interests include developing and applying data science approaches for precision public policy in the context of health, nutrition and development; and understanding individual and population heterogeneity in health and well-being from a multilevel and cross-comparative perspective.
Christina Paxton is the President of Brown University. Prior to her appointment at Brown, Paxson was dean of the Princeton School of International and Public Affairs and the Hughes Rogers Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She founded and directed both the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging and the Center for Health and Wellbeing at the Princeton School of International and Public Affairs. Paxson is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore College, and earned her PhD in economics at Columbia University.
Cecilia Rouse is the Katzman-Ernst Professor in Economics and Education, and professor of economics and public affairs. She currently serves as the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for the Biden Administration. She is the former dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. A labor economist with a focus on the economics of education, Rouse is the founding director of the Princeton Education Research Section and a member of the National Academy of Education. She has served as senior editor of The Future of Children, a policy journal published by the School and the Brookings Institution, and served on the editorial board of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. She previously served on the boards of the Council of Foreign Relations, University of Rhode Island and the National Bureau of Economic Research, and was an independent director of the T. Rowe Price Funds. From 2009 to 2011, Rouse served as a member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She worked at the National Economic Council in the Clinton administration as a Special Assistant to the President from 1998 to 1999. Rouse joined the Princeton faculty in 1992 after earning her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where she also completed her undergraduate work.
Beth Fussell is an Associate Professor of Population Studies and Environment and Society at Brown University. Fussell’s current research focuses on the long-term effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the exposed residents of the city, regardless of where they are currently living. She has investigated the arrival and reception of the Latino immigrants who formed the rapid response construction labor force, the impact of displacement on the health of vulnerable low-income mothers, and differentials in return migration of displaced New Orleans residents. Her new research focuses on the generalizable aspects of hurricane impacts on population change. She received her PhD and MS from the University of Wisconsin Madison and her BA from Bryn Mawr College.
Erin Dunn is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist with expertise in genetics and epigenetics. Her research laboratory uses interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the social and biological factors that influence the etiology of depression among women, children, and adolescents. The goal of her work is to identify the causal mechanisms underlying risk for depression, translate that knowledge to population-based strategies for prevention, and target those strategies to “sensitive periods” in development. Sensitive periods are high-risk/high-reward stages in the course of the lifespan when experience, whether exposure to adversity on the one hand or health-promoting interventions on the other, can have lasting impacts on brain health. Through her efforts to determine when these sensitive periods occur, her goal is to design interventions that not only promote brain health across the lifespan, but are also uniquely timed to minimize the consequences of stress exposure, prevent depression before it onsets, and make the most efficient use of limited public health dollars. Dr. Dunn is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and is affiliated with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, and the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health at MGH.
Karestan Koenen is a Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology. She aims to reduce the population burden of mental disorders through research, training, and advocacy. She is passionate about using science to overcome violence and trauma, which are major preventable causes of health problems globally. She received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Boston University, her MA in Developmental Psychology from Columbia, and her BA in Economics from Wellesley College.