How our surroundings shape health: A conversation between environmental scientists
For more than 50 years, Jack Spengler has advanced our understanding of how environment shapes health through pioneering research on the importance of air quality, healthy buildings, and climate resilience. In conversation with longtime collaborator Linda Powers Tomasso, Spengler explores how the places we live, learn, and work shape human health. Together, they reflect on the evolution of environmental health over five decades and the importance of continued collaboration and mentorship in shaping a more sustainable future.
Register for free to submit your questions.
An on-demand video will be posted after the event.
Speakers
About The Studio
Monday Nutrition Seminar | AI-driven Integration of EMR and Molecular Data for Maternal and Child Health
Please join the Department of Nutrition for the Monday Nutrition Seminar featuring Nima Aghaeepour, PhD, Endowed Professor and Vice Chair for Research (Data Science) in the Department of Anesthesiology, Peri-operative, and Pain Medicine; Professor in the Department of Pediatrics; and Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University. Dr. Aghaeepour’s talk—”AI-driven Integration of EMR and Molecular Data for Maternal and Child Health”—will take place on April 27 at 1:00 p.m. ET in FXB G-13 and via Zoom (registration is required).
Healthy snacks will be provided, thanks to the generous support of the Wellbeing Project Fund from the Office of the Associate Provost for Student Affairs.
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 click the “Register Today” button to fill out the registration form by 3:00 p.m. ET on the Friday before the seminar to request a visitor pass to access the building.
Seminar speakers share their perspectives, they do not speak for Harvard.
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Organizers
OEMR Mid-Year Research Presentations
The Department of Environmental Health and the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Residency (OEMR) Program invite you to the next OEMR Mid-Year Research Presentations.
Date: Friday, April 10, 2026 at 1:10pm
Location: Building 1, 1302 and Zoom
Register: Click here to register for Zoom.
Presentations:
- Title: Evaluating the Training Experience in Occupational & Environmental Medicine
- Presenter: Andrew Bagby, MD, MPH, 2nd Year OEMR Resident
- Title: Understanding Mental Health in Residency: The Perspective of Program Leadership
- Presenter: Aditya Nellore, MD, MPH, 2nd Year OEMR Resident
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Monday Nutrition Seminar | Red tape and empty plates: understanding how administrative burden diminishes the effectiveness of food assistance policies
Please join the Department of Nutrition and the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences for the Monday Seminar featuring Professor Erica Kenney, ScD, Associate Professor of Public Health Nutrition in the Department of Nutrition and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at HSPH, and Research Director of the Harvard Prevention Research Center. Dr. Kenney’s talk—”Red tape and empty plates: understanding how administrative burden diminishes the effectiveness of food assistance policies”—will take place on April 13 at 1:00pm ET in FXB G-13 and via Zoom (registration is required).
Lunch will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis.
All of our Monday Seminars are free and open to the public. If you plan to attend this event and do not have a valid HUID, please fill out this form in advance to request a visitor pass to access the building.
Seminar speakers share their perspectives, they do not speak for Harvard.
Speaker Information
Organizers
Screening for Major Diseases — Does it help?
The Cutter Lectures on Preventive Medicine – 10th Symposium
Part of the Cutter Lectures on Preventive Medicine series, The 10th Cutter Symposium “Screening for Major Diseases—Does It Help?” will feature three separate lectures from expert speakers on the topic of screening for colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, and infectious diseases followed by a moderated Q&A segment with all the speakers. This symposium is open to the public & is virtual only.
Schedule of talks:
| 1:00PM | Introducing the Cutter Symposium Albert Hofman, MD, PhD |
| 1:05PM | The Power of Colorectal Cancer Screening Hermann Brenner, MD. MPH Abstract: Over 30 years ago, in 1993, a groundbreaking analysis of the US National Polyp Study was published, which suggested that colonoscopic removal of colorectal polyps was associated with an 88% reduction of colorectal cancer incidence. Since then, numerous observational studies and randomized trials have confirmed effectiveness of colorectal cancer screening, even though most of them substantially underestimated screening effects for various reasons. Large heterogeneity in introduction of and adherence to screening programs across countries in the last three decades is mirrored in large heterogeneity of trends in colorectal cancer incidence and mortality. Modelling studies based on the accumulated evidence confirm that the vast majority of the approximately one million colorectal cancer deaths per year globally could be prevented by screening. |
| 1:35PM | Controversies and Innovations in Screening for Prostate Cancer Lorelei Mucci, ScD Abstract: More than 1.6 million men across the globe are diagnosed with prostate cancer annually, and it is the leading cause of cancer death in more than 50 countries. In randomized controlled trials, screening with prostate specific antigen (PSA) has been shown to reduce cancer mortality over two decades. However, PSA screening also has led to overdiagnosis of prostate cancers that have a low potential for metastasis and concomitant overtreatment of patients. What has ensued over the past two decades has been an active debate about the harms and benefits of screening, guidelines that are often in conflict with one another, and in the United States, a substantial reduction in prostate cancer screening that is now tied to an uptake in incidence of metastatic prostate cancer. This talk will provide an overview of the history of PSA screening, the evidence around risks and harms, the controversies, and recent innovations in approaches to accelerate a risk stratified approach to screening. |
| 2:05PM | Diagnostics, Screening, and Surveillance in Pandemics Marc Lipsitch, DPhil Abstract: This talk will describe challenges and opportunities for surveillance during large infectious disease events, with lessons from COVID-19 and earlier pandemics. Active testing of population-based random samples provide numerous advantages over passive case detection in many situations, while linked data on demographics, severity, and pathogen variant among other characteristics are far more valuable for decision making than the same data if unlinked. Better data can inform more efficient decisions about control measures that improve the ratio of disease control effectiveness to cost and disruption. |
| 2:35PM | General Discussion |
| 3:00PM | Closing by Albert Hofman |
Speakers will share their own perspectives; they do not speak for Harvard.
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Organizers
Why Stability Matters for Early Childhood Development
Join the Center on the Developing Child’s upcoming webinar to explore why stability plays a critical role in shaping young children’s health and development.
Drawing on insights from the new working paper, From Resources to Routines: The Importance of Stability in the Developmental Environment, the conversation will examine how stability—or the lack of it—across children’s developmental environments can affect their well-being in the moment and across the lifespan, and highlight strategies to promote stability for young children and their caregivers.
The conversation will be moderated by our Chief Science Officer, Lindsey Burghardt, MD, MPH, FAAP, and feature Nathaniel Harnett, PhD, Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Natalie Slopen, ScD, Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
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CHDS Seminar with Christopher Jackson
Join the Center for Health Decision Science for a seminar with Christopher Jackson from the University of Cambridge, UK, titled, “Making Semi-Markov Multistate Models for Intermittent Observations Easily Usable.” Multi-state models for changes in a state (e.g. of health or illness) often assume that the transition rate is constant with time spent in the state (the “Markov” assumption). In this seminar, Jackson proposes a new method and software package to relax this often-unrealistic assumption, using hidden states known as “phases.” This is motivated by applications such as modelling the duration of infections, modelling time in a detectable state in cancer screening, and modelling cognitive impairment in studies of ageing.
Christopher Jackson is a Senior Statistician at the MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge. His research involves incorporating statistical methods in models to combine evidence to inform population health policy. His publications cover Bayesian evidence synthesis, survival analysis, multi-state modelling, longitudinal data, decision theory, and model comparison. He has also developed several popular R packages, and co-authored two textbooks, “The BUGS Book” and “Value of Information for Healthcare Decision-Making.”
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Christopher Jackson
Organizers
Brown Bag Seminar: Rethinking rehabilitation in public and global health: Lessons from Japan and adaptation in Uzbekistan
Kaori Yamaguchi, PhD, OTR, is a Takemi Fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a senior researcher at the National Institute of Public Health (NIPH), Japan, the research arm of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW). Her work focuses on rehabilitation within public and global health, while also encompassing health policy and health systems research, including health and long-term care insurance and community-based integrated care in Japan and across Asia. She has also conducted research in social epidemiology, with a focus on aging populations. She is particularly passionate about advancing health equity by addressing both individual-level determinants and broader social and health system contexts.
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Center Member Research Presentation: Hannah Healy, PhD
Join us for a Center Member Research Presentation by Dr. Hannah Healy. Following a brief presentation entitled “Monitoring microbial risks from tap to sewer,” there will be time for all participants to engage in a cross-disciplinary discussion with Dr. Healy and each other.
Summary: Drinking water and wastewater infrastructure are vital to the protection of human health. In this talk, Dr. Healy will discuss how understanding drinking water microbiomes can help prevent waterborne opportunistic infections and how surveilling wastewater metagenomes can serve as a leading indicator of disease prevalence. Finally, she will present the H2O Lab’s current research initiatives and initiate a discussion on synergies with other NIEHS Center research.
About the speaker: Dr. Hannah Greenwald Healy is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Exposure Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with a secondary appointment in Environmental Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She runs the Healy Health ‘Omics (H2O) Lab, which aims to improve public health by monitoring and controlling pathogens and their broader microbiomes in engineered water systems. Dr. Healy is trained as an Environmental Engineer, receiving her BS from Georgia Tech and MS and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to her faculty appointment, she completed a Gaylord Donnelley Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University.
This event will be held in person in HSPH Bldg. 1, 1302 and via Zoom. Register here
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Monday Nutrition Seminar | Food Environment Interventions to Reduce Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption: Updates from California
Please join the Department of Nutrition for the Monday Nutrition Seminar featuring Professor Laura Schmidt from the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Schmidt’s talk—”Food Environment Interventions to Reduce Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption: Updates from California”—will take place on April 6 at 1:00pm ET in FXB G-13 and via Zoom (registration is required).
Healthy snacks will be provided, thanks to the generous support of the Wellbeing Project Fund from the Office of the Associate Provost for Student Affairs.
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 3:00 p.m. ET on the Friday before the seminar to request a visitor pass to access the building.
Seminar speakers share their perspectives, they do not speak for Harvard.
