Rita Hamad, professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and leading social epidemiology scholar, has been named the next faculty director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
“I am delighted that Rita has agreed to serve as the Center for Population and Development Studies’ next director,” said Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Her scholarship exemplifies the center’s core commitment to using evidence-based population data to improve health and well-being around the world.”
“Rita is an outstanding scholar whose innovative work on the social factors that impact health outcomes will position her well to advance the center’s work,” said Senior Vice Provost for Research John H. Shaw. “Her experience with translating this research into practical solutions that drive change in local, national, and international contexts will be a tremendous asset in this role.”
Hamad succeeds Lisa Berkman, Thomas D. Cabot professor of public policy and of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School, who has served with distinction as the center’s faculty director since 2007. Under her leadership, Berkman shaped the center into a hub of interdisciplinary collaboration that has brought together sociologists, economists, epidemiologists, geographers, and demographers to address pressing societal challenges such as aging populations, health inequities, and social and policy influences on health outcomes. She has served as principal investigator on numerous grants, including the center’s current flagship project, Health and Aging in Africa: Longitudinal Studies in South Africa (HAALSA), as well as the landmark workplace intervention study, the Work, Family, and Health Network Study.
Hamad is a social epidemiologist whose research investigates how social factors, like poverty and educational opportunity, shape inequities in health. Specifically, she evaluates how social and economic policies can affect health throughout life, applying interdisciplinary quasi-experimental methods to produce evidence that can directly inform policymaking in this area.
In addition to her role as professor of social epidemiology and public policy, Hamad serves as director of Harvard Chan School’s Social Policies for Health Equity Research (SPHERE) Center, which studies how policies addressing poverty, education, neighborhoods, and other social factors shape health. She serves as an advisory editor for the journal Social Science & Medicine and an associate editor at Health Affairs Scholar. In 2020-2022, she was the James C. Puffer American Board of Family Medicine/National Academy of Medicine Fellow. Formerly a practicing doctor, she worked as a family physician for 10 years in clinics throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
In her capacity as a researcher, Hamad consults with state and federal legislators on how to design poverty alleviation and social safety net policies. She is an active mentor for trainees in the fields of population and health equity research, and she teaches a course at Harvard Chan School on the effects of social safety net policies on health inequities. She holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Stanford University; an M.D. from the University of California San Francisco; an M.P.H. and M.S. in health and medical sciences from the University of California, Berkeley; and a B.A. in chemistry from Harvard University.
“With a projected 9.8 billion people living on the planet by 2050, the field of population studies has incredibly important implications for effective social and health policymaking,” said Hamad. “I look forward to growing the network of researchers at the Center for Population and Development Studies to deepen and expand our knowledge of how to reduce inequities in health and well-being and to share those insights and solutions with policymakers, practitioners, and communities around the world.”
Since its founding in 1964, the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, a University-wide interfaculty initiative based at Harvard T.H. Chan School for Public Health, has worked to advance well-being worldwide by contributing to our understanding of how demographic changes interact with social and economic development. Its goal is to produce population-based evidence that can inform policymaking that supports healthy and resilient societies. For more information, see the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies website.
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