Harvard School of Public Health Research Papers

Richard "Dick" Levins (June 1, 1930 – January 19, 2016) was an ex-tropical farmer turned ecologist, a population geneticist, biomathematician, mathematical ecologist, and philosopher of science who had researched diversity in human... more

Richard "Dick" Levins (June 1, 1930 – January 19, 2016) was an ex-tropical farmer turned ecologist, a population geneticist, biomathematician, mathematical ecologist, and philosopher of science who had researched diversity in human populations. Until his death, Levins was a university professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a long-time political activist. He was best known for his work on evolution and complexity in changing environments and on metapopulations.

Levins' writing and speaking is extremely condensed. This, combined with his Marxism, has made his analyses less well-known than those of some other ecologists and evolutionists who were adept at popularization. One story of his Chicago years is that, in order to understand his lectures, his graduate students each needed to attend Levins' courses three times: the first time to acclimate themselves to the speed of his delivery and the difficulty of his mathematics; the second to get the basic ideas down; and the third to pick up his subtleties and profundities.

Levins also had written on philosophical issues in biology and modelling. One of his influential articles is "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology". He has influenced a number of contemporary philosophers of biology.[citation needed] Levins often boasted publicly that he was a 'fourth generation Marxist' and often had said that the methodology in his Evolution in Changing Environments was based upon the introduction to Marx's Grundrisse, the rough draft of Das Kapital. With the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin (1929–), Levins had written a number of articles on methodology, philosophy, and social implications of biology. Many of these are collected in The Dialectical Biologist. In 2007, the duo published a second thematic collection of essays titled Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health.

Also with Lewontin, Levins had co-authored a number of satirical articles criticizing sociobiology, systems modeling in ecology, and other topics under the pseudonym Isadore Nabi. Levins and Lewontin managed to place a ridiculous biography of Nabi and his achievements in American Men of Science, thereby showing how little editorial care and fact-checking work went on in that respected reference work.

School health services is one of the components of school health programme and is a powerful means of raising community health, especially in future generations. This study examined the availability of school health services in selected... more

Tamara Eugenia Awerbuch-Friedlander, PhD, is a biomathematician and public health scientist at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. Her primary research and publications focus on biosocial interactions that cause or... more

Tamara Eugenia Awerbuch-Friedlander, PhD, is a biomathematician and public health scientist at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. Her primary research and publications focus on biosocial interactions that cause or contribute to disease. She also is believed to be the first female Harvard Faculty member to file a lawsuit against Harvard University for sex discrimination. Currently, she is an instructor in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard School of Public Health. Since the beginning of this century, she has organized and carried out research on conditions that lead to the emergence, maintenance, and spread of epidemics. Her research encompasses sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) such as HIV/AIDS, as well as vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and Lyme disease. Dr. Awerbuch-Friedlander recently researched the spread and control of rabies based on an eco-historical analysis. Her work is interdisciplinary, and her publications are co-authored with members of different departments of the HSPH.

Conditions contributing to the emergence of epidemics are complex in nature, involving biological, ecological, behavioral, environmental, and socioeconomic factors. Most of her research mathematically models these factors as systems that lend themselves to qualitative and quantitative analysis. These models can be used to explore the effect of each factor in the presence of the others as well as new interventions. Many of these models are based on data collected in the field, whether they concern zoonotic diseases such as the population dynamics of the tick that transmits Lyme disease in the Northeastern part of the United States, or sexually transmitted diseases, such as the relative probabilities of HIV1 and HIV2 infection in a cohort of prostitutes in Senegal.

Some of her analytical mathematical models led to fundamental epidemiological discoveries, for example, that oscillations are an intrinsic property of tick dynamics. This means that a decrease in tick abundance in one year does not necessary imply that the same will happen in the next. She presented her work in many international conferences and at the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England, where she was invited to participate in the Program on Models of Epidemics.

Norman Daniels, born in 1942, is an American political philosopher and philosopher of science, political theorist, ethicist, and bioethicist at Harvard University. Before his career at Harvard, Daniels had built his career as a medical... more

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- by Maynard S Clark
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  Jewish Ethics, Science Fiction, Medical Ethics, Health Equity

Abstract: Background and Aim: Responsiveness is of extreme importance in every health system, especially for policy-makers and health managers. Responsiveness relates to how the health system responds to legitimate expectations of the... more

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- by maryam kadkhodaie
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  Health, Public, And, Harvard School of Public Health

Dimitrios Trichopoulos (Greek: Δημήτριος Τριχόπουλος; December 9, 1938 – December 1, 2014), was a Mediterranean Diet expert and tobacco harms researcher. He was Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention and Professor of... more

Dimitrios Trichopoulos (Greek: Δημήτριος Τριχόπουλος; December 9, 1938 – December 1, 2014), was a Mediterranean Diet expert and tobacco harms researcher. He was Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention and Professor of Epidemiology, and a past chair of the Department of Epidemiology, in the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.
Dimitrios Trichopoulos conducted research and taught for more than four decades in the field of cancer epidemiology and prevention. He published more than 1,000 scientific papers, continually charting scientific frontiers, from seminal research linking secondhand smoke (SHS) from cigarettes with increased susceptibility to risk for lung cancer, and hepatitis B virus and tobacco smoking with increased risk of primary liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma), to findings documenting that surgically induced and early natural menopause reduced breast cancer risk. Beyond oncology, his paper linking psychological stress after an earthquake in Athens to increased risk of cardiac death was included in a 1997 list in The Lancet of 27 papers deserving to form a core canon of medical literature that every health professional should read.

His oncology epidemiology and prevention research career included significant "firsts": He was first, with a 1990 paper in The Lancet, to propose that in utero exposures play a major role in breast cancer causation. He also was first in 1981, along with an independent paper published a few days later, to report that secondhand smoke increases the risk of lung cancer. Dimitrios Trichopoulos studied 51 nonsmoking women in Greece who had been hospitalized with lung cancer, then he compared them with age-matched women who had been hospitalized (also in Greece) for other problems. Though seemingly self-evident, researchers were able to determine statistically that these cancer patients were significantly more likely to have been exposed to their husband’s cigarettes. Follow-up studies then began to confirm the risks of smoke inhalation by children in smoking households or in nonsmokers who live nearby smoking, in adjacent apartment units.

A native of Greece, Dimitrios studied at the University of Athens Medical School, where he earned an M.D. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1971. In 1968, he earned a S.M. in Boston at the Harvard School of Public Health and held several teaching appointments there over the next two decades (lecturer, 1969–1970; visiting professor, 1981–1985; adjunct, 1988–1989).

Harvard appointed him a full professor in the Department of Epidemiology in 1989, which department he began to chair that same year succeeding Brian MacMahon, and serving in that role until 1996. Initiatives under his leadership included a series of collaborations with investigators now at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1993, he was named Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention, and also began a four-year appointment as director of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention.

Dimitrios Trichopoulos also was a Member of the Athens Academy and president of the Hellenic Health Foundation in Greece. He held teaching appointments at the University of Athens Medical School and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
His numerous awards and distinctions include honorary doctorates, the Brinker International Award for Breast Cancer Clinical Research, Harvard School of Public Health’s Julius Richmond Award (2004) and Alumni Award of Merit (2009), and the Medal of Honor of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, World Health Organization.

He is survived by his wife Antonia, who is known as "mother of the Mediterranean Diet".

David John Hunter, MBBS, MPH, ScD, is Acting Dean of the Faculty and former Dean for Academic Affairs at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and Vincent L. Gregory Professor in Cancer Prevention. He also is an... more

Daniel I. Wikler (born 1946) is an American public health educator, philosopher, and medical ethicist. He is currently Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of... more

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- by Maynard S Clark
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  Ethics, Bioethics, Public Health Ethics, Professional Ethics

The specialty of family medicine is centered on lasting, caring relationships with patients and their families. Family physiciansintegrate the biological, clinical and behavioral sciences to provide continuing and comprehensive health... more

Marvin Zelen (June 21, 1927 – November 15, 2014) was Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical... more

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- by Maynard S Clark
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  Biostatistics, Cancer, Informed Consent, Experimental Design

Barry R. Bloom is Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Department of Global Health and Population in... more

Barry R. Bloom is Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Department of Global Health and Population in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, where he served as Dean of the Faculty in 1998 through December 31, 2008.

As Dean, he served as Secretary Treasurer for the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH). Prior to that he served as chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1978 to 1990, the year in which he became an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), where he also served on the National Advisory Board. In 1978, he was a consultant to the White House on international health policy.

A leading scientist in the areas of infectious diseases, vaccines, and global health, and a former consultant to the White House, Dr. Barry Bloom continues to pursue an active interest in bench science as the principal investigator of a laboratory researching the immune response to tuberculosis, a disease that claims more than two million lives each year.

For more than 40 years, he has been extensively involved with the World Health Organization (WHO). He is currently Chair of the Technical and Research Advisory Committee to the Global Programme on Malaria at WHO and has been a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Health Research and chaired the WHO Committees on Leprosy Research and Tuberculosis Research, and the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee of the UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases. Dr. Bloom serves on the editorial board of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

Dr. Bloom currently serves on the Ellison Medical Foundation Scientific Advisory Board and the Wellcome Trust Pathogens, Immunology and Population Health Strategy Committee. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Advisory Council of the Paul G. Rogers Society for Global Health Research.

His past service includes membership on the National Advisory Council of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Center for Infectious Diseases of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Advisory Board of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, as well as the Governing Board of the Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Bloom was the founding chair of the board of trustees for the International Vaccine Institute in South Korea, which is devoted to promoting vaccine development for children in the developing world. He has chaired the Vaccine Advisory Committee of UNAIDS, where he played a critical role in the debate surrounding the ethics of AIDS vaccine trials. He was also a member of the US AIDS Research Committee.

Dr. Barry Bloom continues to pursue research on understanding the mechanisms of protection against tuberculosis, as an investigator in a Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenge grant with Professor David Edwards the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where they apply nanoparticle technology to deliver needle-free spray-drying aerosol vaccines against experimental tuberculosis, with UCLA colleagues. This vitamin D-dependent antimicrobial killing mechanism is effective against the tubercle bacillus and is found in human macrophages, and is unrelated to oxygen or nitrogen radicals. This may explain the greater susceptibility of people of African and Asian descent to tuberculosis.

Richard Alan Cash, M.D., M.P.H. (born June 9, 1941) is an American global health researcher, public health physician, internist, and Prince Mahidol Award / Medal winner. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Health and Director of the... more

Richard Alan Cash, M.D., M.P.H. (born June 9, 1941) is an American global health researcher, public health physician, internist, and Prince Mahidol Award / Medal winner. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Health and Director of the Program on Ethical Issues in International Health in the Department of Global Health & Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. Prior to joining HSPH full-time, he was a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development (previously HIID, now CID) and part-time at HSPH. He is gifted at figuring out how to show others how to do much with very little.

Cash began his international career over 40 years ago when he was assigned by NIAID of the NIH to the Pakistan-SEATO Cholera Research Laboratory (CRL) in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now the ICDDR,B in Dhaka, Bangladesh). While there, he and his colleagues developed and conducted the first clinical trials of oral rehydration therapy (ORT) in adult and pediatric cholera patients and patients with other infectious causes of diarrhea.[1] This technology matches the volume of fluid losses from dehydration patients with the volume they consume so that the fluid replacement packets greatly reduce or completely replace IV therapy (particularly where it is not feasible or unavailable), which was then the only current treatment for cholera. Discoveries in ORT have been estimated to have saved over 50 million lives worldwide. World Health Organization (WHO) estimates are that at least 60 million children have been spared painful deaths because of ORT. They also conducted the first field trials of ORT, the first community-based trials of ORT, and the first use of amino acids (glycine) as an additional substrate. In the late 1970s, Cash worked with BRAC (presently the world's largest NGO in terms of programs and personnel) on their OTEP (Oral Therapy Extension Programme), which taught over 13 million mothers and caregivers how to prepare and use ORT in the home using the "pinch and scoop" method.

Cash continues to work with BRAC on a number of their health and education projects. After joining Harvard 30 years ago (at HIID and HSPH), he worked on a number of international programs that stressed implementation, training, and capacity building. In particular, the ADDR (Applied Diarrheal Disease Research project) provided over 150 grants to developing country scientists and led to over 300 publications in national and international journals. At HSPH, Cash has taught a wide variety of courses, including Introduction to International Health, the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease of Importance in Developing Countries, Ethical Issues in International Research, and Urban Health Care in Developing Countries. He also leads field-trip courses to Kerala, India, and Bangladesh for HSPH students.

At present, he has visiting faculty appointments at the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Sciences Studies in Trivandrum, Kerala, India (teaching in the MPH program for the past nine years) and at the James P. Grant School of Public Health of BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh (a member of the international board of advisors and teaching in the MPH program for three years). Institution/capacity building in developing nations is very much part of his lifelong professional commitment and work.

It is estimated by WHO researchers that, each year, around 500 million packs of the oral rehydration solution are used in more than 60 developing countries, saving over 60 million lives around the world. For demonstrating how inexpensive and simple-to-use oral rehydration therapy (ORT) could treat cholera and other diarrheal diseases, then by promoting in the developing world customized applications of oral rehydration therapy (ORT) developed by Cash and David R. Nalin (at Merck in Vaccine Development from 1983 to 2002), Cash, David Nalin, and Dilip Mahalanabis became joint recipients of the 2006 Prince Mahidol Award in public health for "exemplary contributions in the field of public health" and for their contributions "to the application of the oral rehydration solution in the treatment of severe diarrhea worldwide, including Thailand.

On November 8, 2011, Cash was presented with the 2011 James F. and Sarah T. Fries Foundation Prize for Improving Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for his leadership in the development and dissemination of Oral Rehydration Therapy as a practical treatment for cholera and other diarrheal diseases that has saved the lives of at least 60 million children worldwide.

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- by Maynard S Clark and +1
  Richard Cash
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  History of Public Health, Himalayan Civilization-Nepal, Public Health, Nepal

Abstract: Background and Aim: Responsiveness is of extreme importance in every health system, especially for policy-makers and health managers. Responsiveness relates to how the health system responds to legitimate expectations of the... more

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  Health, Public, And, Harvard School of Public Health

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