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
Center Member Research Presentation: Mi-Sun Lee, PhD
Join us for a Center Member Research Presentation by Dr. Mi-Sun Lee on Environmental exposures, biomarkers, and early life health. Following a brief presentation, there will be time for all participants to engage in a cross-disciplinary discussion with Dr. Lee and each other.
Abstract: This talk will highlight findings from pilot and cohort studies motivated by pressing social and public health concerns, examining how environmental exposures affect pregnancy and early-life health. Dr. Lee will present biomarker-based results on PAH exposure in children living near a steel mill, metals and biomass fuel exposures in a birth cohort in Bangladesh, and youth vaping. She will also briefly introduce ongoing work in the Boston Lung Cancer Study.
About the speaker: Mi-Sun Lee, PhD, MPH, is a Research Scientist in environmental and molecular epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her work focuses on the health effects of environmental exposures—such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), metals, and air pollution—on cardiopulmonary and pregnancy outcomes, with an emphasis on emerging public health concerns. She has conducted biomarker-based studies of PAH exposure in children living near a steel mill in South Korea; birth cohort studies in Bangladesh examining metal mixtures, household air pollution, and adverse pregnancy outcomes; and studies of environmental and molecular markers in lung cancer. Her recent projects include angiogenic markers and stillbirth in Bangladesh and ambient particle radioactivity and survival in the Boston Lung Cancer Study (BLCS).
This event will be held in person in HSPH Bldg. 1, 1302 and via Zoom. Register here
Speaker Information
Organizers
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
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
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
Organizers
Quality science for quality decisions: The political regulatory cycle and the integrity of benefit cost analysis with Al McGartland, PhD
Please join the Harvard Chan NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and the Department of Environmental Health for a talk by Al McGartland, PhD, of New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Dr. McGartland will discuss “Quality science for quality decisions: The political regulatory cycle and the integrity of benefit cost analysis.”
This event will be held in person (HSPH Bldg. 1, 1302) and via Zoom. Register here
About the speaker
Al McGartland is the director of Economic Policy at New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. At Policy Integrity, Al works to improve regulatory economic analyses, integrating law, policy and economics into both research and public commentary.
Al served as the Director of the National Center for Environmental Economics and the lead economist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2005 to 2025. In this role, Al advised EPA’s senior leadership on regulatory analyses, science, economics, and environmental policy. He was responsible for insuring EPA’s analyses reflects the latest economic science and developed interdisciplinary risk assessment, benefit assessment, and environmental justice methods to be used in EPA’s regulatory analyses. Al also led the analytic efforts to support U.S. negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol and led the U.S. delegation to the OECD’s Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches.
Under Al’s leadership, EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics issued EPA’s Guidelines for Preparing Economic Analyses and conducted numerous studies to assess the benefits and costs of environmental policies. Al also supported numerous interagency and White House initiatives, including projects on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, the Frontiers of Benefit Cost Analysis, and the valuation of reduced health risks from environmental contaminants.
Prior to EPA, Al worked at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. Al also served as the economic advisor to the Chairman at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He is a Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of the profession of environmental and resource economics. Al is also the recipient of the Society of Benefit Cost Analysis fellow and received two Presidential Rank Awards during his EPA career. He holds a PhD from the University of Maryland in environmental economics. Al has published in numerous journals, including Science, the American Economic Review, the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, the Canadian Journal of Economics, the Journal of Environmental Management, the medical journal, Lancet, and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.
Speaker Information
Organizers
Brown Bag Seminar: Evidence triangulation in dementia research
Maria Glymour is professor and chair of the department of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health. Her research examines how social factors experienced across the life-course, from infancy to adulthood, influence cognitive function, dementia, stroke, and other health outcomes in older adults. A separate theme of her research focuses on overcoming methodological problems encountered in analyses of the social determinants of health, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia.
Speaker Information
Maria Glymour
Organizers
Community-Engaged Research Working Group in Environmental Health
Join the Harvard Chan NIEHS Center’s working group on community-engaged research in environmental health!
This working group brings together faculty, trainees, students, and staff to discuss the methods and practice of conducting community-engaged research with a focus on environmental health.
We’ll meet in person in Building 1, 1302 on February 2, 1-2:00 pm.
February agenda: We will share successes and challenges in our own ongoing community-engaged research, and discuss how we can collaborate in this research field.
Please email niehsctr@hsph.harvard.edu to RSVP!
Speaker Information
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.