Brown Bag Seminar: Menstrual cycle characteristics as a window into whole body health
Shruthi Mahalingaiah is Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Reproductive and Women’s Health in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also a physician in reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Massachusetts General Hospital. Mahalingaiah’s research explores how environmental and modifiable risk factors influence reproductive health and gynecological diseases. Her work focuses on the impact of air pollution, environmental toxicants, and diverse cohort studies on conditions like PCOS, ovulatory disorders, and placental diseases across the reproductive lifespan.
Speaker Information
Organizers
Climate change: Seeking bipartisan solutions in turbulent times
Climate change poses an enormous threat to people worldwide. How can we most effectively address it? This program brings together Gina McCarthy, who led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama, and former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis for a dynamic conversation. They will discuss the merits of regulatory and free market solutions and explore opportunities to work across political divides. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to discover hopeful, pragmatic approaches to today’s most pressing environmental issues.
Register for free to submit your questions.
An on-demand video will be posted after the event.
Speakers
Bob Inglis
Gina McCarthy
Moderator
About The Studio
Breast Cancer Genome-Wide Association Studies: The End of the Beginning?
Join us on Wednesday, November 5 for the Epidemiology Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Peter Kraft discussing Breast Cancer Genome-Wide Association Studies: The End of the Beginning? .
Abstract: Breast cancer clusters in families, but rare, high risk pathogenic variants in known genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 explain only a small proportion of this familial aggregation. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified over 150 independent common variants associated with breast cancer incidence, but more risk variants remain to be found, in part because of the limited diversity of published GWAS. I describe the Confluence Project (https://confluence.cancer.gov/), a collaboration among multiple international consortia to conduct a breast cancer GWAS in over 450,000 cases and 1,300,000 controls, approximately tripling the overall sample size of the largest breast cancer GWAS to date and quadrupling the sample size in previously undersampled genetic ancestry groups. I discuss governance, computing, and analytic issues raised by such large and diverse data, including approaches to conducting multi-ancestry GWAS and fine-mapping analyses. I also discuss the opportunities provided by integrating well-powered GWAS with emerging experimental genomic annotations and multimodal pathological characterization of tumors. Separately, I provide an update on the Connect for Cancer Prevention Cohort (https://www.cancer.gov/connect-prevention-study/) and its plans for broad data sharing.
Bio: Dr. Kraft is the Director of the Trans-Divisional Research Program in the NCI’s intramural Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. He provides strategic leadership to transdisciplinary research teams across the Division, helping identify and shape new research opportunities and oversees data platforms and tools that enable collaboration. Dr. Kraft’s research focuses on devising and applying statistical techniques to large-scale observational studies of genetic and circulating biomarkers, with particular emphasis on studies understanding the joint contribution of germline DNA variation, environmental exposures and biomarkers to risk of complex disease. He has contributed to multiple international consortia studying genetics and other exposures in relation to cancer risk over the last twenty years. Prior to joining DCEG, Dr. Kraft was Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from 2003-2023. He remains an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School.
Speaker Information
Peter Kraft, PhD
Organizers
Related Events
Brown Bag Seminar: Sharing experiences and discussing the future of Fukushima in radiation education at Fukushima Medical University
Isamu Amir is a research fellow in the Takemi Program in International Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an assistant professor in the department of radiation health management at Fukushima Medical University (FMU) School of Medicine. Amir obtained his PhD from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2018, where he specialized in translation studies in linguistics and science communication. He has worked with the Consulate General of Japan in Boston, University of Tokyo, and Ministry of the Environment (MOE). He is dedicated to addressing discrimination, prejudice, and unfounded rumors about the health effects of radiation exposure derived from the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Speaker Information
Isamu Amir
Organizers
Student Meet and Greet with the Initiative on Health and Homelessness
✨ Come meet the Initiative on Health and Homelessness at Harvard Chan! ✨
Join us for an engaging meet-and-greet with the Initiative on Health and Homelessness (IHH), a collaborative hub bringing together research, practice, and policy to address one of today’s most pressing public health challenges. This is your chance to learn about our work, connect with our Steering Committee, faculty, staff, and partners, and discover opportunities to get involved.
You’ll also meet the Chan Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH), our dynamic student group leading advocacy, action, and awareness-building efforts across campus. Whether you’re interested in research, policy, service, or community engagement, there are many ways to contribute and make an impact.
✨ Don’t miss this chance to expand your network, explore meaningful opportunities, and help advance solutions to homelessness.
🍴 Lunch will be provided!
Organizers
Protecting Young Children From the Impacts of Wildfires
Wildfire smoke is becoming an increasingly common part of childhood in many parts of the US. While we often associate wildfires with remote or forested locations, they are increasingly happening in more urban settings—such as the January 2025 fires in Los Angeles—and the smoke can travel thousands of miles, remaining highly toxic. This means that exposure to wildfire smoke is a growing concern far beyond fire zones, with implications for the health and development of young children in both the short term and throughout their lifespan.
Join us for a live discussion on how wildfire smoke affects young children, focusing on how the LA Fire HEALTH Study aims to better understand the short- and long-term health impacts of wildfires. The study addresses the need for answers in the LA community and has broader implications for many communities across the US that are increasingly dealing with wildfire smoke.
Panelists will share emerging findings from the study and how these insights can guide efforts to reduce exposure, support children and caregivers, and protect healthy development—especially for those most affected by recent wildfires.
The discussion will be led by our Chief Science Officer, Lindsey Burghardt, MD, MPH, FAAP, and will feature panelists Joseph Allen, DSc, MPH, Associate Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program, and Sujeet Rao, Health and Wellbeing Practice Director at the Public Exchange at the University of Southern California.
Speakers
Moderator
Joseph G. Allen
<strong>Sujeet Rao</strong>
<strong>Lindsey C. Burghardt</strong>
Organizers
The role of translational global health research in apocalyptic times with Caroline Buckee, D.Phil.
Please join the Harvard Chan NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and the Department of Environmental Health for a talk by Caroline Buckee, D.Phil., of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Buckee will discuss “The role of translational global health research in apocalyptic times.”
This event will be held in person (HSPH Bldg. 1, 1302) and via Zoom. Register here
About the speaker
Dr. Caroline Buckee joined Harvard School of Public Health in the summer of 2010 as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, and was promoted to Professor in 2021. From 2013-2023, Dr. Buckee was the Associate Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. She co-founded and co-directs Crisis Ready (crisisready.io), a joint platform between Harvard’s Data Science Initiative (HDSI) and Direct Relief, to support data-driven responses to public health emergencies and disasters. Dr. Buckee co-leads the South Asia Climate and Health Research Cluster supported by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.
Dr. Buckee’s research interests span infectious disease epidemiology and ecology – with a focus on vector borne diseases including malaria and dengue – human mobility and the impact of labor migration on the spread of epidemics, and the intersection of climate risks and human health and well-being. Dr. Buckee’s group actively supports National Malaria Control Programs in the global south to improve surveillance and analytical approaches to targeting interventions. Her group has several projects focusing on the impact of gold-mining on malaria transmission and control in the Amazon region in South America. In India, Dr. Buckee’s group is working with communities to understand the impact of extreme heat on poor working women, and to develop community-led intervention research.
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Organizers
Deep Learning–Based Estimator for the Non-Iterative Conditional Expectation (NICE) g-Formula
Join us on Wednesday, October 22 for the “Works In Progress” Epidemiology Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Jing Li discussing Deep Learning–Based Estimator for the Non-Iterative Conditional Expectation (NICE) g-Formula .
Abstract: The g-formula can be used to estimate causal effects of sustained treatment strategies using observational data under the identifying assumptions of consistency, positivity, and exchangeability. The non-iterative conditional expectation (NICE) estimator of the g-formula also requires correct estimation of the conditional distribution of the time-varying treatment, confounders, and outcome. Parametric models, which have been traditionally used for this purpose, are subject to model misspecification, which may result in biased causal estimates, particularly in high-dimensional or nonlinear settings. To address these limitations, we propose a unified deep learning framework for the NICE g-formula that leverages recurrent neural networks to flexibly model the joint conditional distribution of time-varying variables. Through simulation studies, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed deep learning–based estimator over conventional parametric approaches and establish its statistical validity through uncertainty quantification.
Bio: Dr. Jing Li is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CAUSALab in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, working under the mentorship of Prof. Miguel Hernán. Her research focuses on combining causal inference and machine learning to better understand the effects of treatments and interventions in complex longitudinal settings. Her current work includes advancing g-formula methods, developing deep learning techniques to improve the estimation of sustained treatment effects, and building large-scale simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of deep learning-based estimators. Her work has appeared in leading venues such as CVPR, ICLR, AAAI, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), and NeurIPS workshops. In addition to academic publications, she is the primary developer of the open-source Python package pygformula, and also contributes to several other causal inference software packages, including gfoRmula and gfoRmulaICE. Jing Li received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Peking University, where she was advised by Prof. Yizhou Wang in the School of Computer Science. She received her bachelor’s degree in Statistics from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Wuhan University.
Speaker Information
Jing Li, PhD
Organizers
Related Events
Social Demography Seminar with John Wilmoth
John Wilmoth, PhD presents “The future of world population: Divergent trends, competing narratives, and the role of the United Nations.”
Speaker Information
John Wilmoth, PhD, Director, Population Division, United Nations
Organizers
Heat, Health and the City: Community, Housing, and Health System Solutions
The Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE) invites you to join us for this in-person breakout session as part of Harvard Climate Action Week. Breakout sessions are first come, first served. Please plan to arrive early to the session.
Extreme heat is an increasingly urgent public health problem in cities, where dense populations and built environments can intensify health risks for vulnerable communities. This panel will showcase how local initiatives are addressing public health and climate challenges related to extreme heat in urban environments. Panelists will discuss real-life strategies that connect scientific research to equitable interventions, aiming to protect health and reduce disparities in cities. The session will highlight related Harvard Chan research, including work in Boston’s redlined communities.
