Kubzansky Research Group
Dr. Laura Kubzansky is professor of social and behavioral sciences and director of the Society and Health Laboratory at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a sitting faculty member at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and served as a founding director of both the JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program and the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard Chan School.
677 Huntington Avenue
Kresge Building, Room 603
Boston, MA 02115
Interrelationships between Social and Physical Environments and Effects on Health
I have conducted research evaluating the hypothesis that social stress may exacerbate toxic exposures within the physical environment, thereby potentiating social disparities in health. Because social and physical environmental exposures often cluster, it is challenging to disentangle their health effects. To address this challenge, with a collaborator I proposed a new framework for understanding inter-relationships between the social and physical environments, emotion, and health. This has helped set the stage for further research, highlighting the importance of: the timing of exposure to stress and pollution, whether joint effects of pollution and stress on health might be nonlinear, physiologic mechanisms, and relative spatial distributions of social and physical exposures at multiple geographic scales.
Sample Publications:
- Olvera Alvarez HA, Appleton AA, Fuller CH, Belcourt A, Kubzansky LD. An Integrated Socio- Environmental Model of Health and Well-Being: A conceptual framework exploring the joint contribution of environmental and social exposures to health and disease over the life span. Current Environmental Health Reports, 2018; 5(2):233-243. PMCID N/A.
- Hahn J, Gold DR, Coull BA, McCormick MC, Finn PW, Perkins DL, Rifas Shiman SL, Oken E, Kubzansky LD. Air pollution, neonatal immune responses, and potential joint effects of maternal depression. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021; 18(10):5062. PMCID: PMC8150899.