Harvard Pop Center Social Demography Seminar: Navigating—and leveraging—existing data sources to guide sound public health programming to address social determinants of health
Sabrina Hermosilla, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of population and family health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, presents “Navigating—and leveraging—existing data sources to guide sound public health programming to address social determinants of health.”
The Social Demography Seminar (SDS) series at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies provides a lively forum for scholars from across the university to discuss in-progress social scientific and population research. Social demography includes work that uses demographic methods to describe and explain the distribution of social goods across populations. The hybrid series offers presentations on a wide variety of topics such as family, gender, race/ethnicity, population health—including mortality, morbidity, and functional health—inequality, immigration, fertility, and the institutional arrangements that shape and respond to population processes.
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CHDS Seminar with Mark Strong of University of Sheffield, UK
Join the Center for Health Decision Science for a seminar with Mark Strong of the University of Sheffield, UK, School of Medicine and Population Health, “Understanding and Managing Uncertainty in Model-Based Decision Making.” We commonly use computer models to help us make decisions in healthcare resource allocation. Should we fund a particular new drug, for example? However, even with our best model we still might make a wrong decision. This is because we can almost never eliminate uncertainty. This seminar will cover the meaning of uncertainty in a model-based decision making context, and how we can manage it, with particular reference to the quantification of the value of new information.
Mark Strong is Dean of the School of Medicine and Population Health at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is a public health physician and Professor of Public Health, and has conducted research on a wide range of topics relating to public health, health economics, health services research, epidemiology and statistics. He is a Chartered Statistician of the UK Royal Statistical Society and his core research interests relate to the quantification and management of uncertainty in healthcare decision making.
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Love Data Rodeo: A Roundup of Useful Ways to Wrangle Your Data
Wrangle your data at the Harvard Library’s Love Data Rodeo. Celebrate Love Data Week by learning how to tame and transform your data in style!
You are cordially invited to this exciting round-up of platforms, tools, and strategies to help you successfully work with your data. During this 2-hour event, representatives of Harvard approved platforms will be on hand to provide demonstrations and share the support they can provide to help you make the most of your research data.
This event will be held in-person in the Lamont Library Forum Room. The Forum Room is located on the third floor of Lamont Library. A Harvard ID is required to enter the Lamont Library. We recommend attendees bring their laptops to more deeply engage with the resources that will be demoed. Registration is recommended, but not required.
This event is open to all Harvard students, postdocs, researchers, faculty, and staff. There are no prerequisites or assumptions of knowledge.
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Community Data Preservation: A Climate & Health Datathon
Join Countway librarians, members of the Public Environmental Data Partners, and fellow data enthusiasts to capture and preserve our public health care data in the CAFE Harvard Dataverse Collection. Celebrate Love Data Week by ensuring access to federal environmental data.
Health and environmental data is crucial to our work and our everyday lives. It is important that this invaluable public data is maintained and kept available in its true unaltered form for us now and in the future.
This is an open, three-hour event where we will chat about the importance of data preservation and good data management, then pivot to capturing crucial public health information, reports, and datasets for preservation in Harvard Dataverse. No data science skills are needed!
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Harvard Chan i-Night 2026
The Harvard Chan Student Government Association’s i-Night is back for its 35th year!
Join us for an exciting evening of performances that celebrate and showcase the talents, cultures, and diversity of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health community!
Food and refreshments will be provided! Please RSVP to inform catering needs. Families and guests are welcome to join; up to two guests are allowed per student attendee. Children under 10 do not count towards the guest list.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and performances begin at 7:00 p.m.
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Alumni insights: Careers in entrepreneurship and innovation
Presented jointly with the Office of Career and Professional Development
Join a panel of Harvard Chan School alumni for an engaging discussion on bringing innovation and entrepreneurship to public health. Discover how they built their careers, what skills matter most, and how to apply their insights to your own professional journey in this candid conversation.
Register for free to submit your questions.
An on-demand video will be posted after the event.
Speakers
Hailey How
Ivan Hsiao
Amber Nigam
Fiza Shaukat
Moderator
David Garcia Lou
About The Studio
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/
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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
Organizers
Related Events
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.