Marcella Alsan, the Angelopoulos Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, has received the Humboldt Research Award, honoring her outstanding academic record to date. Given to up to 100 researchers around the world each year, the Humboldt Research Award includes a €60,000 grant and an invitation to conduct a project in collaboration with German scholars.
“I am honored and delighted to receive this award, and I am excited to use it to better understand the health care system in Germany with my collaborators there,” Alsan said.
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation bestows the honor on leading researchers across disciplines “whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and beyond and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge academic achievements.”
Alsan’s innovative work has won wide acclaim and spanned the fields of economics, medicine, and public health policy. An applied microeconomist, Alsan has studied health inequities during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on Black men in rural Alabama, and much more. Her work has a particular focus on health inequalities.
Alsan is the first serving Kennedy School professor to be granted the Humboldt Research Award since 2002. She previously won the MacArthur Fellowship for her work examining the legacies of discrimination and mistrust in perpetuating racial disparities in health. In 2022, she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Alsan earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard College, a master’s degree in public health from the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, a medical degree from Loyola University Chicago, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. She served as an associate professor of medicine, economics, and health research and policy at Stanford before joining the Harvard faculty in 2019. Alsan is affiliated with the Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and the Center for International Development. She is also affiliated with the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and the Chan School’s Department of Health Policy and Management.
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