Nourishing Humanity in the Age of Climate Change
20th Annual Stare-Hegsted Lecture
Dr. Jessica Fanzo, Professor of Climate and Food and Director of the Food for Humanity Initiative at Columbia University’s Climate School, serves as the distinguished speaker for the 20th Annual Stare-Hegsted Lecture.
Hosted by the Department of Nutrition, Dr. Fanzo’s talk on “Nourishing Humanity in the Age of Climate Change” will take place in Kresge G2 and via Zoom on October 20, 2025 at 4:00pm. This event is free and open to the public.
This annual lecture honors Drs. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted, who were the founders of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 1942, which was the first department of nutrition in any medical center or school of public health in the U.S.
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Speaker Information
Dr. Jessica Fanzo
Organizers
Brown Bag Seminar: Mental health and psychosocial support for male former Yazidi child soldiers in northern Iraq: Gaps in humanitarian response and legal obligations
Serhat Yildirim, MD, MMSc, obtained his medical degree from Ghent University in Belgium and completed his master of medical sciences in global health delivery at Harvard Medical School as a Fulbright and Fayat Scholar. His research, under Theresa Betancourt, focused on mental health services for former Yazidi child soldiers in northern Iraq.
Yildirim is currently a research associate at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, working on reparations as a public health intervention, healthcare delivery in conflict zones, and immigration health. He has also participated in humanitarian missions in the Middle East and North Africa and is dedicated to advancing equity and the rights of vulnerable communities worldwide.
If you require a visitor’s pass and are not an HUID holder, please reach out to kploeg@hsph.harvard.edu.
Speaker Information
Organizers
At the Interface of Epidemiology and Health Decision Science: Jointly Shaping Cancer Screening Strategies
Join us on Wednesday, October 15th for the Epidemiology Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Uwe Siebert discussing “At the Interface of Epidemiology and Health Decision Science: Jointly Shaping Cancer Screening Strategies“.
Abstract: Epidemiologic analyses provide essential evidence for decision-analytic models guiding cancer screening policy. This presentation highlights how such data are generated, transformed, and linked to inform clinical guidelines, health technology assessments, and citizen information, with case examples from colorectal cancer screening in the U.S. and Europe. Decision-analytic models rely on epidemiologic inputs –-such as disease prevalence, test performance, prognosis, and treatment effectiveness – to compare strategies that differ in age limits, intervals, test modalities, and risk-based algorithms. These models quantify trade-offs between benefits (reduced morbidity/mortality) and harms (false positives, complications, overdiagnosis). To ensure reliable guidance, cross-disciplinary understanding is critical: epidemiologists must recognize how their estimates influence model outputs, while decision scientists must understand the assumptions, limitations, and causal interpretations of those estimates. By fostering collaboration across biostatistics, epidemiology, global health and decision science, we can strengthen the evidence base for cancer screening and ensure strategies appropriately balance benefits and harms.
Bio: Uwe Siebert, MPH, MSc, ScD, is a physician by training and Professor of Public Health, Medical Decision Making and Health Technology Assessment (HTA), Chair of the Department of Public Health, Health Services Research and HTA at UMIT TIROL – University for Health Sciences and Technology in Austria, and Director of the International Continuing Education Program in HTA and Decision Science (htads.org). He is also Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology and Health Policy & Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Uwe is the current President- of ISPOR – The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research and former President of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM).
His research interests include applying evidence-based quantitative and translational methods in the framework of health care policy advice and HTA as well as in the clinical context of routine health care, public health policies and patient guidance. He has worked with several HTA Agencies in Europe, Brazil, US and Canada and he advises public and government agencies, academic institutions and industry regarding the conduction of HTAs and their impact on policy and reimbursement decisions. He has authored more than 500 publications and is an Editor of the European Journal of Epidemiology and editorial board member of several scientific journals.
Speaker Information
Uwe Siebert, MD, MPH, MSc, ScD
Organizers
Herbert Sherman Memorial Lecture: Micky Tripathi, Mayo Clinic
The Department of Health Policy and Management invites you to join the bi-annual Herbert Sherman Memorial Lecture, featuring Dr. Micky Tripathi, Chief Artificial Intelligence Implementation Officer at the Mayo Clinic. The event will include an in-person lecture by Dr. Tripathi, who will be speaking about AI applications to health care delivery, followed by a reception. Further details about the event and Dr. Tripathi’s lecture will be posted here as the date approaches.
This event has now passed. Click below to watch a recording of the lecture.
Herbert Sherman Memorial Lecture, featuring Dr. Micky Tripathi, Mayo Clinic
Friday, October 17th, 2025
Lecture: 3:00-4:00PM, Kresge 502
Reception: 4:00-5:00PM, Kresge Atrium
In-person only
All questions can be directed to Rachel Levitt (rlevitt@hsph.harvard.edu). Please note: Speakers’ remarks are based on their own scholarship and experiences. They do not speak for Harvard.
About the Lecture
“The Digital Transformation of Health Care“
The publication of the Institute of Medicine’s landmark studies “To Err is Human” and “Crossing the Quality Chasm” brought national attention to the question of how to harness information technology to advance the quality, safety and efficiency of our health care system. Two decades of hard work by the public and private sectors has transformed the largest and most complex sector of the US economy from paper to digital. As is now clear, that investment was just the prelude to the AI future that we’re now building. This lecture will reflect on the lessons learned from the creation of this digital foundation, and the opportunities and challenges ahead in the AI era.
About the Herbert Sherman Memorial Lecture Series
The Herbert Sherman Memorial Lecture is a bi-annual lecture series in honor of Dr. Herbert Sherman, who was an electrical engineer on the faculty at MIT and the Draper Labs who became interested in health care delivery and moved to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was particularly interested in healthcare IT, quality of care, operations research, and technology assessment. Dr. Sherman brought multidisciplinary and creative solutions to the problems of health care delivery. This lecture series features experts in the field of health policy or management who reflect Dr. Sherman’s legacy of bringing multidisciplinary and creative solutions to the problems of health care delivery.
Speaker Information
Micky Tripathi, PhD
Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., is Mayo Clinic’s chief artificial intelligence implementation officer. With a focus on oversight and ongoing monitoring of artificial intelligence (AI) across the Mayo Clinic enterprise, Dr. Tripathi drives AI adoption and establishes streamlined pathways to integrate safe and effective AI into the clinical practice.
With over three decades of healthcare leadership experience, Dr. Tripathi’s expertise spans public and private sectors in strategy, product development and operations with a proven track record in leading large-scale health information technology (IT) projects and fostering collaborations. He served as a top federal official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he oversaw clinical data standards, health IT policies, interoperability and health AI regulations. His work established nationwide data and interoperability standards across all HHS divisions and more than 500 electronic health record (EHR) products, impacting 97% of hospitals and 78% of physician offices across the nation. As the HHS’s chief AI officer, he developed AI transparency and risk management regulations for more than 900 certified EHR developers. He also vetted and approved all AI applications.
Before joining HHS, Dr. Tripathi served as chief alliance officer at Arcadia. In that role, he was responsible for developing and executing inorganic growth strategies ranging from enterprise partnerships to mergers and acquisitions. Further, he served as the president and CEO of Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, providing health IT and data analytics services to healthcare customers across the U.S.
Dr. Tripathi received his undergraduate studies at Vassar College, earned his master’s degree from Harvard University and completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recognized for his visionary yet practical leadership, Dr. Tripathi has served on numerous boards, and he excels in managing complex initiatives at the intersection of health, technology, business and regulation.
The Role of Plumbing Biofilms in Healthcare Acquired Infections
Title Talk
The Role of Plumbing Biofilms in Healthcare Acquired Infections
THIS SPEAKER WILL BE IN PERSON IN FXB 301.
The event will be hybrid.
Speaker Information
Plumbing systems provide ideal growth conditions for polymicrobial biofilms that often contain health-relevant microorganisms. In hospitals, where 1 in 31 patients contracts a healthcare acquired infection, biofilm control is of the utmost importance for infection prevention. In this seminar, Hannah Greenwald Healy, Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Exposure Science, will present research from several sampling campaigns at Yale New Haven Hospital. Using a combination of metagenomic and culture-based methods, she and her team investigated plumbing biofilms throughout water systems, with broad implications for infection prevention and wastewater surveillance.
What on Earth is “Pluralism” for American Life Today?
You are invited to the What on Earth is “Pluralism” for American Life Today? Co-sponsored by the Center for Bioethics (HMS), the Office for Community and Belonging (HSPH), and Office of Dental Education (HSDM).
Diana L. Eck is a Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies Emerita at Harvard University and Frederic Wertham Research Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society. She is also founder and Director of the Pluralism Project, which for nearly 30 years has studied the changing religious landscape of America and its significance for American society. As a scholar of India, she has published Banaras, City of Light, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, and India: A Sacred Geography. With the Pluralism Project, she turned her attention to the U.S. and has produced an extensive web-based resource for understanding multi-religious and multi-cultural America. On the subject of pluralism she has written Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras and A New Religious America: How A ‘Christian’ Country Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. In 1998, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton for her work on religious pluralism in America and in 2011 she delivered the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh on “The Age of Pluralism.”
Speaker Information
Diana Eck
Organizers
The Big Joy Project: Using Daily Microacts to Promote Global Well-Being
On Wednesday, March 11th, 2026, from 1-1:50 PM in FXB G13 and online, all are welcome to join us for the fifth installment in our Virtues for Well-being seminar series, featuring leading expert on joy Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas.
Speaker Biography
Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, PhD, is the Science Director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). She runs the GGSC’s annual research fellowship program as well as major research initiatives on topics like gratitude, humility, and love. She teaches the science of well-being widely, including open online courses that have enrolled over 1M learners worldwide. Emiliana leads collaborative efforts to give widespread access to well-being insights and practical strategies for improvement, and also investigate impact on individuals, interpersonal dynamics, and biological processes. She co-edited the 2017 Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, and co-authored the 2025 Daily Flourish: A Science Backed Journal to Build Positivity, Connection, and Resilience. Emiliana serves as an expert voice on the neuroscience and social implications of prosocial states like compassion and awe and the well-being benefits of generous and nurturing behaviors.
Speaker Information
Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas
Organizers
On Thin Ice: stories of trust (and mistrust) in Arctic research and policy
The Office of Field Education and Practice is pleased to host the first Community Engaged Learning Seminar with colleagues from the Harvard Arctic Initiative.
Moderated by Sappho Gilbert, postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Chan School and research fellow at the Arctic Initiative, this panel will explore the role of trust in research and policy with Arctic communities, focusing on how it is built, sustained, and at times lost and rebuilt. Drawing on examples from knowledge co-production and community engagement, governance, health care, food systems, and infrastructure, panelists will detail the risks of broken trust and the potential of lockstep, community-centered partnerships. Panelists include Harvard Chan student and Rose Service Learning Fellow, Kenzo Kimura and Fulbright Scholars at the Arctic Initiative, Alexandra Middleton, Hans Peder Kirkegaard and Juho Kähkönen.
Register for the in-person event here.
Attend via Zoom
Organizers
Metabolic flexibility and healthy aging with William Mair, PhD
Please join the Harvard Chan NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and the Department of Environmental Health for a talk by William Mair, PhD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Mair will discuss “Metabolic flexibility and healthy aging.”
This event will be held in person (HSPH Bldg. 1, 1302) and via Zoom. Register here
About the speaker
Dr. William Mair is a Professor of Molecular Metabolism at Harvard, and Director of the Harvard T.H. Chan Healthy Aging Initiative. He received his BSc in Genetics and PhD in Biology from University College London, and completed his postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA. The Mair lab studies mechanisms that mitigate the risks of aging, with a focus on metabolism and how changes to food intake can impact the aging process. They are defining how nutrient and energy sensors in cells become dysfunctional with age, leading to metabolic inflexibility and accelerated aging. Dr. Mair’s work aims to develop therapeutics that maintain healthy metabolic function, thereby enabling our bodies to process the food we eat effectively as we age to prolong healthy aging. Dr. Mair has won numerous awards for his work on aging and geroscience, including the American Federation Breakthrough in Gerontology Award, the Glenn Medical Foundation for Medical Research Scholar Award and the Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Aging Research Award. He is co-founding director of the MBL Biology of Aging Summer Research Course, and organizes several international conferences on geroscience and aging biology.
Speaker Information
Organizers
Center Member Research Presentation: Peng Gao, PhD
Join us for a Center Member Research Presentation by Dr. Peng Gao on Mapping the human exposome: From population pattern to cellular resolution. Following a brief presentation, there will be time for all participants to engage in a cross-disciplinary discussion with Dr. Gao and each other.
Summary: This presentation will explore cutting-edge approaches in environmental health that integrate chemical exposomics with multi-omics technologies to understand how environmental exposures influence human health. Dr. Gao will discuss our recent work on precision environmental health monitoring, including longitudinal profiling of personal exposomes and their connections to disease outcomes, with particular emphasis on applications in cancer, neurodegeneration, and respiratory health research. The talk will highlight opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration in advancing exposome science across scales, from population-level patterns to individual monitoring and down to molecular and cellular mechanisms.
About the speaker: Dr. Peng Gao is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Exposomics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses on characterizing the human exposome, the totality of environmental exposures and their biological responses, and understanding its role in chronic disease development. Dr. Gao’s lab develops and applies advanced analytical chemistry and computational approaches to measure chemical and biological exposures in environmental and biological samples, integrating these with multi-omics data to investigate disease etiology. Before joining Harvard, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health and completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine.
This event will be held in person in HSPH Bldg. 1, 1302 and via Zoom. Register here