Yerby Fellowship Program
Yerby Fellows work under the guidance of senior faculty at Harvard Chan School to develop research agendas, receive grant support, and pursue publication. They can also gain teaching experience and other professional development as they work toward entry-level positions in academia.
Meet the Fellows
If you are interested in becoming a Yerby Fellow, take a look are our current and past fellowship recipients below, see what research they are working on, read testimonials, and find out where they are now.
Current Fellows
Yerby Fellow, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
mcroston@hsph.harvard.edu
Mentor(s): Kasisomayajula (Vish) Viswanath
Yerby Fellow: 2025 –
Research Interests: Dr. Merriah Croston received a PhD in Public Health Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, Croston held scientific positions at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Georgia Department of Public Health. Croston is passionate about addressing health communication inequalities through research and practice that aims to understand and meet the health information needs of hardly reached communities. Croston’s research primarily focuses on the health information ecosystem of Black digital communities. Her dissertation research, titled “Old Frames on New Media: Health Misinformation in Black Digital Communities,” employed traditional statistics and social network analysis to characterize the supply of COVID-19 misinformation on Black Twitter during the pandemic. As a Yerby Fellow, Croston will expand on this work by pursuing a set of multi-platform, mixed methods studies that further characterize how and why health (mis)information spreads to and within Black communities on social media.
Yerby Fellow, Department of Environmental Health
hzewdie@hsph.harvard.edu
Mentor(s): Francine Laden and Jaime Hart
Yerby Fellow: 2025 –
Research Interests: Dr. Hiwot Zewdie received a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Washington School of Public Health. Zewdie’s research is focused on the health and health equity implications of neighborhood built environments in settings including the U.S., Colombia, and Ethiopia. Zewdie’s career goal is to advance place-based epidemiologic research to improve understanding of contextual determinants of noncommunicable diseases and related disparities, particularly in the Global South where such research remains limited. As a Yerby Fellow she will focus on (1) integrating mixture-modeling methods into place-based epidemiology to improve exposure assessment and disease risk characterization of neighborhood environments, and (2) strengthening place-based research capacity in the Global South.