Alumni News: Spring 2025
Alumni honors, career moves, and items of note
Tackling mental health problems using a heavy dose of data
Alejandro Szmulewicz, PhD ’22, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard Chan School, recently shared how his research is driven by figuring out the best ways to prevent and treat mental health disorders.
What we lose when we politicize public health
Michelle Bowdler, SM ’93, recently published a commentary on WBUR.
1998
Timothy Ferris, MPH, joined Red Cell Partners, an incubation and investment firm, in January as president of its health care practice. Ferris previously spent three years at National Health Service England, serving as its inaugural national director of transformation, and is a former CEO of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization.
2000
Margaret Kruk, MPH, joined the faculty of Washington University (WashU) in St. Louis, Missouri. Margaret joined GHP in 2015 as associate professor of global health and was promoted to professor of health systems in 2019. She is the director of the QuEST Centers and Network, a multi-country research consortium generating evidence to build high-quality health systems. While she remains adjunct professor of health systems in GHP, at WashU, Kruk will serve as distinguished professor in health systems and medicine in the department of medicine and as director of the university-wide QuEST Center. The center will expand the consortium’s work to new areas, including inequities in health care quality in the U.S.
Kruk is organizing the Science for Health Systems 1st Biennial Conference, the inaugural research conference on cutting-edge science and translation to advance health systems across the globe. The conference will take place in St. Louis in October.
Bookshelf
Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development
(Routledge, 2024)
By Paul Holinger, MPH ’78
Holinger explores how human development’s three most basic systems—affects (our earliest feelings), cognition, and language—enhance potential and help prevent problems, both in individuals and in societies. The book is a follow-up to his last book, What Babies Say Before They Can Talk (Simon and Schuster, 2003).
Human Aggression, War, and Genocide: The Psychological Roots of Violence
(Pitchstone Publishing, March 2025)
by Kevin Volkan, MPH ’98 and Vamik D. Volkan
This book explores sociopolitical phenomena through the lens of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, concentrating on concepts like aggression, leadership, and the psychology of ethnic, national, religious, and ideological large groups.
In memoriam
Alison Field, ScD ’95, died October 10 at 58. She was associate dean for faculty affairs and a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Brown University School of Public Health. She previously served on the Harvard Chan School faculty. Her research spanned nutritional, pediatric, and psychiatric epidemiology with a specific focus on how eating disorders and obesity should be best classified. Last year, she was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy for Eating Disorders. Read a remembrance by Brown SPH Dean Ashish Jha, MPH ’04.
Harvard Chan alumni in action:
Read stories submitted by alumni about their lives after graduation.
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