Harvard Pop Center Social Demography Seminar with Julia Behrman
Julia Behrman, PhD, associate professor of sociology, Northwestern University, presents “The deinstitutionalization of parenthood in the United States.”
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.
With the aim of disseminating scholarly research, The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies hosts a diverse array of speakers. They do not represent or speak for the Center, the School or the University, and hosting them does not imply endorsement of their views, organizations, or employers.
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Harvard Pop Center Social Demography Seminar with Bocar Ba
Bocar Ba, PhD, Kathleen Kaylor and G. Richard Wagoner Jr. Assistant Professor of Economics, Duke University, presents “Understanding demand for police alternatives.”
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.
With the aim of disseminating scholarly research, The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies hosts a diverse array of speakers. They do not represent or speak for the Center, the School or the University, and hosting them does not imply endorsement of their views, organizations, or employers.
Speaker Information
Organizers
Managing Your Electronic Records: Shared Drives and Email
Does it take ages to find a file in your shared drive? Are you running out of room in your email? Save yourself and your office time and money by learning to manage your electronic records. In this workshop, we’ll help you manage your email and electronic records efficiently and effectively by giving you guidelines for:
- Naming and organizing your files for fast and easy access
- Developing a file plan for your office shared drive
- Determining which emails you should keep, and how to store them
- Learning how to keep your digital records in compliance with Harvard’s records management policies
Workshops are about 45 minutes long. Attendance is free and open to all members of the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health communities. Familiarity with the General Records Schedule (grs.harvard.edu) is helpful but not required.
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Managing Your Paper Records: Off-Site Records Storage
Run out of room for files in your office that you need to keep? The Harvard Depository records center is the perfect place for your office, department, or lab to store records that you need to keep but don’t use every day. In this online workshop, we’ll review step-by-step instructions for:
- How to set up an account
- How to pack and label boxes correctly
- How to complete transfer paperwork
- How to recall records back to your office
Workshops are about 30 minutes long. Familiarity with the General Records Schedule (GRS) is helpful but not required. Attendance is free and open to all members of the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health communities.
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Introduction to the General Records Schedule
Do you know how long you need to keep your office records, and what you should do when you no longer need them? In this workshop, we’ll help de-mystify records retention by showing you how to use and understand the Harvard University General Records Schedule (GRS). We’ll give you all the information you need to:
- Identify your records using the GRS
- Determine how long to keep your records
- Decide if records should be destroyed or archived
- Know who to contact if the GRS doesn’t describe your records
Workshops are about 30 minutes long. Attendance is free and open to all members of the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health communities.
Organizers
What do we owe participants? Ethics and practice of environmental health data report-back
This second workshop of a two-part series offered by the NIEHS Center Science Communications Hub will expand on concepts from the first workshop and discuss the ethics and best practices of communicating results to study participants and affected communities. The first workshop provides an introduction to environmental health literacy and developing communications approaches to reach a wide variety of audiences.
Please register separately for both workshops: Workshop 1 (30 September) and Workshop 2 (28 October).
Learning Objectives
- Describe key ethical arguments for returning environmental health results to study participants
- Identify practical and ethical considerations that shape how results are returned, including uncertainty, data quality, potential barriers, and participant preferences
About the Speaker
Katie Tomsho is an Instructor in the Department of Environmental Health and Director of the Environmental Justice and Health Program. Her prior experiences as a community organizer focused on environmental science led to her interest in effective communication of environmental health data. Building on this work, she has focused on improving rigorous, transparent methods for communicating environmental health data to diverse audiences. Her research interests include environmental exposure data report-back, environmental health literacy, and the development of communication strategies that support community decision-making.
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Making our science easier to understand: Environmental health literacy basics for researchers
This first workshop of a two-part series offered by the NIEHS Center Science Communications Hub will provide an introduction to environmental health literacy and developing communications approaches to reach a wide variety of audiences. The second workshop will expand on these concepts and discuss the ethics and best practices of communicating results to study participants and affected communities.
Please register separately for both workshops: Workshop 1 (30 September) and Workshop 2 (28 October).
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this workshop, you will be able to:
- Describe the basic concepts of literacy, numeracy, and environmental health literacy
- Identify factors of communications that pose challenges for audiences with low literacy skills
- Apply basic tools to enhance accessibility of written materials
About the Speaker
Katie Tomsho is an Instructor in the Department of Environmental Health and Director of the Environmental Justice and Health Program. Her prior experiences as a community organizer focused on environmental science led to her interest in effective communication of environmental health data. Building on this work, she has focused on improving rigorous, transparent methods for communicating environmental health data to diverse audiences. Her research interests include environmental exposure data report-back, environmental health literacy, and the development of communication strategies that support community decision-making.
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Beyond survival: To what extent does Australian disaster and emergency management policy consider population health?
Join the Department of Global Health and Population for this Brown Bag Seminar featuring Claire Leppold, Takemi Fellow in International Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and senior research fellow at University of Melbourne, and Kate Brady, senior research fellow at University of New South Wales.
Please note that an HUID is required to attend this in-person event.
Speaker bios
Claire Leppold, PhD, is a Takemi Fellow in International Health at Harvard Chan School and a senior research fellow at the Disaster, Climate & Adversity Unit, University of Melbourne. She is also an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow (2026–2029) and a Westpac Research Fellow (2026–2031). Claire’s research examines how to support communities in recovery from cascading and compounding disasters. This focus began during her time living and working in Fukushima following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. In 2020, Claire moved to Australia to begin work at University of Melbourne, where she has since led studies on recovery from the 2019–20 bushfires and repeat floods, including the commissioned evaluation of the Australian Red Cross Bushfire Recovery Program (2020–2023). She has worked with state government, non-government organizations, and community groups to identify ways of changing from a “single disaster” focus in emergency management to one that addresses combined effects across multiple disasters. She has a particular interest in the social determinants of health in disaster settings.
Kate Brady, PhD, has had a distinguished career in disaster recovery operations, programming, and research. Kate is the senior research fellow for the University of New South Wales HowWeSurvive initiative, an Honorary Academic Specialist at University of Melbourne, and technical advisor to Australian Red Cross Emergency Services, where she established and led the disaster recovery program for 12 years. Most of Kate’s work focuses on what people find helpful and unhelpful after disasters. Throughout her career, she has had significant influence on state and national emergency management policy and has an international profile in collective trauma, resilience, and disaster recovery programming and policy. Kate is co-author of the Australian Disaster Recovery framework and was an advisor in the development of the National Disaster Mental Health Framework. In 2021, she became the host for ABC’s podcast “After the Disaster” and gave a TEDx talk in 2025.
Speaker Information
Kate Brady
Organizers
Collective organisation as crisis infrastructure: Evidence from the Self-Employed Women’s Association during COVID-19 in India
Join the Department of Global Health and Population for this Brown Bag Seminar featuring Satchit Balsari, associate professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Kartikeya Bhatotia, Climate Fellow at the Mittal South Asia Institute, Harvard University.
Please note that an HUID is required to attend this in-person event.
Seminar description
The pandemic, and the societal response to it, had crippling impacts on livelihoods, food security, and wellbeing around the world. Drawing on a mixed-methods study of more than 1,090 member households belonging to the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA)—a federation of trade cooperatives and unions representing nearly four million women in Gujarat, India—this talk asks whether long-standing community organizations can serve as a form of crisis infrastructure. The study finds that, despite widespread income loss and food insecurity during COVID-19, households embedded most deeply in SEWA’s cooperatives, credit institutions, and community health networks recovered fastest and most fully. They did so by drawing on layered, sequenced coping strategies, while SEWA’s health counselors—already trusted within these same networks—helped sustain access to care and vaccination where formal systems were delayed or distrusted. The findings suggest that collective organization and relational trust among informal workers must be recognized as genuine social protection infrastructure. Early findings from this study were shared through a traveling multimedia exhibition, Hum Sab Ek.
Speaker bios
Satchit Balsari, MD, MPH, is an associate professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor of global health and population at Harvard Chan School. His research and teaching are focused on complex humanitarian emergencies and digital health implementation science in resource-poor settings. He has worked with populations affected by war and disasters across the world, leveraging cutting-edge digital tools and citizen science to advance public health planning, advocacy, and response. Satchit co-directs CrisisReady.io, a research-response platform that builds data-driven decision tools for local communities and response agencies affected by disasters globally. He is founding director of the tri-institute Climate and Human Health fellowship at Harvard, leads the climate platform at the Mittal South Asia Institute, and is co-investigator on the Salata Institute’s inaugural interfaculty cluster grant on Climate Adaptation in South Asia. He directs the Harvard India Digital Health Network at the Mittal South Asia Institute and is the curator of Hum Sab Ek, an immersive multimedia traveling exhibition currently on tour. The exhibition is based on his research into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2.9 million members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and their response to the crisis.
Kartikeya Bhatotia, MPP, is a Climate Fellow at the Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University, where he works on research and programming for the climate platform. His work brings environmental, health, and social science research into conversation with public policy. He is particularly interested in how informal social systems shape community responses to slow-onset environmental hazards and how collective institutions support health and livelihoods in the Global South. At Harvard, he has contributed to the Salata Institute’s Climate Adaptation in South Asia research cluster and the Harvard Global Health Institute’s Heat and Worker Protections Scholarly Working Group. Before Harvard, Kartikeya worked at Tata Trusts and the Institute for Financial Management and Research, applying behavioral economics to health, climate, and economic development in informal contexts. He was a 2018 Young India Fellow at Ashoka University and earned a master’s degree in public policy form Harvard Kennedy School in 2024.
Speaker Information
Kartikeya Bhatotia
Organizers
What makes care possible? Protection, trust, and solidarity in global health
Join the Department of Global Health and Population for this Brown Bag Seminar featuring Christos Christou, former international president of MSF and visiting scholar at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
Please note that an HUID is required to attend this in-person event.
Seminar description
Drawing on experiences from humanitarian crises, conflict settings, and epidemic response, this talk explores three conditions that make care possible: the protection of patients and health workers, trust in science and the institutions that deliver care, and solidarity in responding to needs that transcend borders. Through selected cases, Christos Christou will reflect on what happens when these conditions erode and why defending them is essential to defending humanity itself.
Speaker bio
Christos Christou, MSc, PhD, is a surgeon and humanitarian leader who served as international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) from 2019 to 2025. He joined MSF early in his medical career and has worked in humanitarian settings affected by conflict, displacement, epidemics, and limited access to health care. As international president, he led MSF through the COVID-19 pandemic and major humanitarian crises, while advocating for the protection of civilians and health workers, equitable access to health care, and respect for international humanitarian law.
Christos trained in general and trauma surgery in Greece and the United Kingdom and has worked as a consultant in emergency and colorectal surgery in the NHS. He is currently a visiting scientist at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His academic and teaching interests include humanitarian leadership, trust within communities, health in conflicts, and the protection of medical care. He also contributes to advisory initiatives in global and humanitarian health.
Christos holds a PhD in surgery, an MSc in international health and health crisis management, and the European Board of Surgery Qualification in Coloproctology. In 2025, he was named to the TIME100 list of the world’s most influential leaders shaping the future of philanthropy.
Speaker Information
Christos Christou
