Africa Health Conference – Future-Proofing Africa: Investing in Impact and Innovation
Join us at the 2026 Africa Health Conference to explore innovative solutions to advance health in Africa by pre-registering by Sunday, January 18 HERE.
The Africa Health Conference is a dynamic platform that brings together experts, researchers, practitioners, students, and community stakeholders dedicated to advancing forward-thinking solutions for Africa’s evolving health challenges.
The 2026 conference will take place on Saturday, February 21, 2026, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with an online attendance option available. This year’s theme is “Future-Proofing Africa: Investing in Impact and Innovation”. It builds on last year’s sessions that focused on adaptive strategies in health financing, technology, and resilience. This year, the conference will guide participants in reimagining Africa’s development landscape amidst a rapidly changing global context. We will move beyond traditional approaches to explore innovative financing mechanisms and highlight how African entrepreneurs, businesses, and creative thinkers are driving impactful solutions in various fields, from healthcare to technology.
For questions, please contact us hsphafricahealthconference@gmail.com or visit our website: https://africa-health-conference.hsph.harvard.edu/
Organizers
The Grand Challenge of Child Mental Health: Lessons from the Great Smoky Mountains Study
Join us on Wednesday, April 15th for a joint seminar between the Department of Epidemiology and the Maternal and Child Health Concentration featuring Dr. Bill Copeland discussing The Grand Challenge of Child Mental Health: Lessons from the Great Smoky Mountains Study.
Abstract: Child psychopathology is common, costly, and impairing. Indeed, the greatest burden of disease in the first 2 decades of life is related to mental health. This presents a great opportunity: Effective care for these diseases in childhood has the potential to mitigate and forestall later psychopathology (i.e., treatment as prevention). This talk will use data from a 30+ year psychiatric epidemiological study to demonstrate the ways in which this opportunity is often squandered contributing to misery, morbidity, and mortality in adulthood.
Bio: Dr. Copeland is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont and the Thomas M Achenbach Chair in Developmental Psychopathology. He was trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Vermont and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at Duke University Medical Center. He is the principal investigator of the prospective, longitudinal Great Smoky Mountains Study has been following 1420 participants in rural Appalachia for over 30 years to understand the long-term consequences of early adverse experiences and the development of mental illness. His research program has focused on understanding the developmental epidemiology of emotional and behavior problems across the lifespan. This work includes understanding the interplay between early adverse experiences and genetic vulnerability with other individual, family, and contextual characteristics.
His research has been supported by NIMH, NIDA, NICHD, NIA, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. This program of research has led to over 180 peer-reviewed manuscripts including publications in JAMA, JAMA: Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, Lancet Psychiatry, American Journal of Public Health, Molecular Psychiatry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Communications. His work has been covered in such national news outlets as Slate, the New York Times, TIME magazine and CNN. Dr. Copeland was named on the Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher list in 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Speaker Information
Bill Copeland, PhD
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The Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture with Atul Gawande
The Mechanics of Public Man-Made Death: USAID’s Destruction At One Year
The Trump Administration’s abrupt dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has triggered a wave of already hundreds of thousands of deaths, mostly of children, around the world. Atul Gawande—former leader of global health at the agency—draws on data, historical parallels, and on-the-ground fact-finding to reveal how gains against malnutrition, infectious disease, and child mortality are being rapidly reversed. Gawande argues that this is a case of “public man-made death,” and calls for accountability and renewed commitment to lifesaving global health efforts.
This event is open to the public and will be recorded. Please register to attend. Please plan on being seated by 4:15 p.m. as the event will start promptly at 4:30 p.m.
Speaker biography:
Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is a renowned surgeon, author, and public health innovator. He holds the John and Cyndy Fish Chair in Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is the Samuel O. Thier Professor of the Practice of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He was Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID from January 2022 to January 2025. Prior to that, he cofounded and chaired Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation where he is now Distinguished Professor in Residence, and Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. From 2018–2020, he was CEO of Haven, the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase healthcare venture.
Dr. Gawande is also a longtime writer for The New Yorker magazine and has written four New York Times bestselling books: Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and has won two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on healthcare, and a MacArthur Fellowship. And he is executive producer for three documentary films: the Emmy-nominated adaptation Being Mortal (2016), the Oscar-nominated film To Kill A Tiger (2024), and The New Yorker film Rovina’s Choice (2025).
Speaker Information
Chair
Organizers
US Life Table Program: Data Challenges, Methodological Solutions, and Moving into the Future
Join us on Wednesday, March 25th for the Department of Epidemiology seminar series featuring Dr. Elizabeth Arias discussing US Life Table Program: Data Challenges, Methodological Solutions, and Moving into the Future.
Abstract: The presentation will provide a historical overview of the US Life Table Program and a summary of the data challenges and methodological solutions employed over the years. The talk will include a description of the US National Vital Statistics System with its inherent challenges and limitations. Specific topics covered will include old age data quality, racial and ethnic misclassification, and small geographic area estimates. The goals for the future of the program will be discussed.
Bio: Dr. Elizabeth Arias is the Director of the US Life Table Program and the Mortality Statistics and Research Team Lead in the Division of Vital Statistics, at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Dr. Arias received her Ph.D. in Sociology (Demography) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At NCHS, Dr. Arias has worked to expand the US Life Table Program’s racial, ethnic, and geographic coverage, developing methods to address data quality limitations. Under her leadership, the program has expanded from two race groups to five race and Hispanic origin populations, annual state life tables, and life tables by census tracts. Dr. Arias also conducts research on racial and ethnic mortality disparities with a special focus on the Hispanic population.
Speaker Information
Elizabeth Arias, PhD
Organizers
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Cross-Disorder Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders: Findings and Methodologic Challenges
Join us on Wednesday, March 11th for the Department of Epidemiology seminar series featuring Dr. Jordan Smoller discussing Cross-Disorder Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders: Findings and Methodologic Challenges.
Abstract: Psychiatric disorders are highly comorbid, heritable, and genetically correlated, raising fundamental questions about the nature of shared versus disorder-specific genetic influences. Large-scale genome-wide association studies and multivariate genetic models now provide compelling evidence for both pervasive pleiotropy and meaningful etiologic differentiation across major psychiatric disorders. This seminar will review key findings from recent cross-disorder genetic analyses including recent work characterizing shared and disorder-specific genetic architecture using multivariate genomic approaches. We will also discuss methodological challenges that complicate cross-disorder inference, including heterogeneity in phenotypic assessment, differences in case and control ascertainment, and selection biases inherent in clinical cohorts, electronic health records, and population biobanks. Addressing these challenges will be important for robust and clinically-meaningful inferences about the underlying structure of psychopathology.
Bio: Dr. Jordan Smoller is a psychiatrist, epidemiologist, and geneticist whose research focus has been understanding the genetic and environmental determinants of psychiatric disorders across the lifespan and using big data to advance precision mental health including improved methods to reduce risk and enhance resilience.
Dr. Smoller is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Professor in Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. At Massachusetts General Hospital, he is the Jerrold F. Rosenbaum Endowed Chair in Psychiatry, Director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry, Director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit in the Center for Genomic Medicine, and co-Director of the Center for Suicide Research and Prevention at MGH and Harvard. Dr. Smoller is a Tepper Family MGH Research Scholar and also serves as Director of the Omics Unit of the MGH Division of Clinical Research and co-Director of the Mass General Brigham Training Program in Precision and Genomic Medicine. He is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute and past President of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics.
He has played a leading role in national and international efforts to advance precision and genomic medicine. He is a Principal Investigator (PI) in the eMERGE (Electronic Medical Records and Genomics) network, founding PI of the PsycheMERGE Consortium and lead PI of the New England Precision Medicine Consortium as part of the NIH All of Us Research Program. He is also co-Chair of the Cross-Disorder Workgroup of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC). He is an author of more than 650 scientific publications and is also the author of The Other Side of Normal (HarperCollins/William Morrow, 2012).
Speaker Information
Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD
Organizers
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Some Recent Results on the Epidemiology of Dementia
Join us on Wednesday, April 1st for the Department of Epidemiology seminar series featuring Dr. David Hunter discussing Some Recent Results on the Epidemiology of Dementia.
Abstract: Studies of the epidemiology of Dementia are complicated by the fact that until recently the two main subtypes – Alzheimer’s Disease and Vascular Dementia could not be readily distinguished clinically, and may have distinct etiologies. Although that has changed somewhat with the advent of PET scans and CSF biomarkers, these are not yet used in routine clinical practice that is reflected in the clinical records that are available in large-scale observational databases such as the UK Biobank. I will discuss some recent collaborative studies in the Department of Population Health at Oxford and elsewhere that both illustrate these issues, and seek to help resolve them.
Bio: David Hunter is the Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine and Director of the Translational Epidemiology Unit at Oxford Population Health, the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, UK. He founded the Program in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics at Harvard and was co-chair of the steering committee of the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium at the National Cancer Institute. He was co-director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Susceptibility Markers project focused on genome-wide association studies, and Dean for Academic Affairs and Acting Dean at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He is the founding Chief Science Advisor of Our Future Health a major new national initiative in the UK that aims to return genomic information to consenting participants. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2021 and appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia in the Australian King’s Birthday Honours List in 2023.
Speaker Information
David Hunter, ScD, MPH
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Community Coffee Hour
Join the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) on Thursday, February 5th for a Community Coffee Hour! Join us for an in-person gathering to meet the HHI team and learn more about their global work. All members of the Harvard community are welcome to join to kick off the new semester, build connections, and foster collaboration. This event will be held in-person only, at HSPH Building 1, Room 1208 (12th Floor) from 11a.m. -12 p.m. ET.
Please RSVP in advance here, and feel free to reach out to hhi@harvard.edu with any questions.
Organizers
Trial Augmentation Using External Data and Models: Toward Harmony Between Observational Studies and Trials
Join us on Wednesday, February 4th for the Department of Epidemiology seminar series featuring Dr. Issa Dahabreh discussing Trial Augmentation Using External Data and Models: Toward Harmony Between Observational Studies and Trials
Abstract: We introduce trial augmentation, a new approach to analyzing randomized trials that leverages external data — either historical experimental data or observational data — to improve trial efficiency without sacrificing the unbiasedness guarantee provided by randomization. We characterize a broad class of randomization-aware estimators that integrate external data through data-adaptive models (e.g., machine learning or generative models), yielding higher efficiency and statistical power than estimators based on trial data alone. Crucially, members of this class exploit randomization to remain unbiased even when the external data are misaligned with the trial population or affected by unmeasured confounding. We show that several widely used estimators, including the efficient trial-only estimator, are special cases within this framework. We further demonstrate how combining two or more randomization-aware estimators yields procedures with two key properties: (1) robustness to misalignment and unmeasured confounding in the external data, and (2) efficiency that is at least as high as, and typically higher than, that of the component estimators. We situate these results within a broader research program aimed at a more harmonious integration of observational analyses and randomized trials.
Bio: Issa Dahabreh, MD ScD is Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Section Head for Epidemiology and Data Science at the Smith Center for Outcomes Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. His research focuses on the design and analysis of randomized trials and observational studies, with an emphasis on causal inference and evidence synthesis. He also develops statistical methods that integrate diverse data sources to improve decision-making in clinical and public health settings.
Speaker Information
Issa Dahabreh, MD, ScD
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Monday Nutrition Seminar | Understanding Food Loss and Waste: Opportunities and challenges across the food supply chain
Please join the Department of Nutrition for the Monday Nutrition Seminar featuring Edward Spang, PhD, Associate Professor of Food Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Spang’s talk—”Understanding Food Loss and Waste: Opportunities and challenges across the food supply chain”—will take place on January 26 at 1:00pm ET on Zoom (registration is required).
Healthy snacks will be provided, thanks to the generous support of the Office of the Associate Provost for Student Affairs’ Wellbeing Fund.
The Monday Nutrition Seminar Series is free and open to the public. If you plan to attend this event and do not have an active HUID, please fill out the registration form by 3:00pm ET on 1/23/26.
Seminar speakers share their perspectives, they do not speak for Harvard.
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Using Values-Based Storytelling to Shift the Public Health Conversation: A Hands-on Workshop
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in health communication—capable of shifting beliefs, building trust, and inspiring action. In this session, led by SBS alum Elissa Scherer (MPH-HSB ’24), we’ll explore why stories stick when facts alone fall flat, and how to harness narrative as a strategy for building community trust and public health impact. Participants will learn how to tell stories about the values that call them to their work and how to craft a narrative-based call-to-action.
This immersive, hands-on workshop is in person only—reserve your spot to join us in the room and leave ready to inspire real-world action.
This seminar is co-sponsored by the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Center for Health Communication.
Speaker Information
Elissa Scherer
