Anti-Racism in Public Health Policies, Practice, and Research

Michelle A. Williams, SM ’88, ScD ’91, is Dean of the Faculty, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Angelopoulos Professor in Public Health and International Development, a joint faculty appointment at the Harvard Chan School and Harvard Kennedy School. She is an internationally renowned epidemiologist and public health scientist, an award-winning educator, and a widely recognized academic leader. Prior to becoming Dean on July 1, 2016, she was Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Program Leader of the Population Health and Health Disparities Research Programs at Harvard’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Center (Harvard Catalyst).

Dean Williams joined the Harvard Chan faculty after a distinguished career at the University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health where she rose through the faculty ranks to become a full professor of epidemiology in 2000. While at the UW, she was very active in the Center for Perinatal Studies at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, becoming co-director from 2000 to 2011, with broad responsibilities for a multidisciplinary research program involving clinical investigators, basic scientists, and epidemiologists. From 1992 to 2010, she was an affiliate investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and from 2008 to 2011 she held a joint appointment in global health at the UW.

The Dean’s scientific work places special emphasis in the areas of reproductive, perinatal, pediatric, and molecular epidemiology. She has extensive experience in carrying out large-scale, multidisciplinary research involving the collection and analysis of epidemiological data (e.g., sleep characteristics, physical activity, dietary intake, and environmental exposures) and biological specimens (e.g., blood-based biochemistry/biomarkers, flow cytometry, genetic variants, whole genome expression of mRNA and miRNA), both domestically and internationally.

Dean Williams has published more than 500 peer-reviewed research papers ranging from studies of modifiable behavioral and environmental determinants of adverse health outcomes to genetic and genomic studies of common complications of pregnancy and chronic disorders among children and adults.

She has administered successfully large-scale, clinical epidemiology studies that seek to understand genetic and environmental causes of adverse pregnancy outcomes and other noncommunicable disorders along the life course. Dean Williams also developed and directed the Reproductive Pediatric and Perinatal Training Program at the UW for more than seven years.

In 1994, Dean Williams developed, and directed until 2019, the NIH-funded multidisciplinary international research training (MIRT) program that allows for the development and operations of undergraduate and graduate student training in global health, biostatistics, and epidemiology in over 14 foreign research sites in South America, South East Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Dean Williams has been recognized for her excellence in teaching, as the recipient of the 2015 Harvard Chan School’s Outstanding Mentor Award, the UW’s Brotman Award for excellence in teaching (2007), the American Public Health Association’s Abraham Lilienfeld Award for education in epidemiology (2007), and the White House’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (2012).

She is a member of several professional and scholarly associations, including the National Academy of Medicine, the Society for Epidemiologic Research, and the American Epidemiological Society (elected). In 2020, she was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and recognized by PR Week as one of the top 50 health influencers of the year.

Dean Williams received her undergraduate degree in biology and genetics from Princeton University in 1984. She has a master’s in civil engineering from Tufts University, and master’s and doctoral degrees in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Barbara Picower is President and Chair of the Board of Directors at The JPB Foundation.  JPB’s mission is to advance opportunity in the US through transformational initiatives that empower those living in poverty, enrich and sustain our environment, and enable pioneering medical research.  Under Barbara’s leadership, JPB has grown to be one of the largest foundations in the US. It has an endowment of $4.5B and has awarded $1.5B in grants since its inception in 2011, including over $350M in grants in 2020.

JPB’s strategic direction is guided by Barbara’s values, a small and engaged staff, a powerful board, and a diverse advisory committee. Ms. Picower is leading JPB to make a significant impact in key areas.

Ms. Picower serves on The Dean’s Advisory Board of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, The Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Obesity Solutions; Board of Directors of Living Cities and the Advisory Board of the Bridgespan Institute.  Barbara has been honored for her social justice and philanthropic leadership by a number of organizations, including the Community Change, and the Trust for Public Land.

Ms. Picower earned her B.A. in Political Science from Hofstra University, and holds a Master of Arts Degree in History and Secondary Education, and a Master of Science Degree in Nutrition, both from New York University.

Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH, is director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights in the department of Social and Behavioral Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

With more than 30 years of experience devoted to promoting health equity and social justice, both in the United States and abroad, Dr. Bassett’s career has spanned academia, government, and not-for-profit work. From 2014 through summer 2018, she served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she made racial justice a priority and worked to address the structural racism at the root of the city’s persistent gaps in health between white New Yorkers and communities of color.

Early in her career, she served on the medical faculty at the University of Zimbabwe for 17 years, during which time she developed a range of AIDS prevention interventions. Building on this experience, she went on to serve as associate director of health equity at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Southern Africa Office, overseeing its Africa AIDS portfolio. Since her return to the United States, she has served on the faculty of Columbia University, most recently as associate professor of clinical epidemiology in its Mailman School of Public Health.

In 2002, Dr. Bassett was appointed deputy commissioner of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In this role, she led the division responsible for New York City’s pioneering tobacco control interventions and food policy, including the nation’s first calorie posting requirements and trans fat restrictions. Her signature program was the launch of District Public Health Offices in several neighborhoods long harmed by racial/ethnic and economic health inequities. These offices now lead targeted, multi-sectoral, multi-agency strategies to reduce excess burden of disease. From 2009 to 2014, Dr. Bassett served as program director for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s African Health Initiative and Child Well-Being Prevention Program.

Dr. Bassett’s many awards and honors include the prestigious Frank A. Calderone Prize in Public Health, a Kenneth A. Forde Lifetime Achievement Award from Columbia University, a Victoria J. Mastrobuono Award for Women’s Health, and the National Organization for Women’s Champion of Public Health Award. She has also been elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine. For many years she served as an associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health. Her recent publications include articles in The Lancet and in the New England Journal of Medicine addressing structural racism and health inequities in the United States.

Dr. Bassett grew up in New York City. She received a BA in History and Science from Harvard University, an MD from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (serving her residency at Harlem Hospital), and an MPH from the University of Washington.

Dr. Margareta (Magda) Matache is a scholar from Romania, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights’ Roma Program, and a Harvard instructor. Her research and teaching focus on the history and manifestations of anti-Roma racism, as well as the global history of race and racism.

From 2005 to 2012, Dr. Matache was the Executive Director of Romani CRISS, a human rights organization that defends the rights of Roma. In 2012, she was awarded a Hauser postdoctoral fellowship at the FXB Center, where she founded the University’s Roma Program.

In 2017, with Jacqueline Bhabha and Andrzej Mirga, she co-edited Realizing Roma Rights, an investigation of anti-Roma racism in Europe. Also, along with Jacqueline Bhabha and Caroline Elkins, Dr. Matache is the co-editor of Time for Reparations, a forthcoming volume exploring the issue of reparations across a broad range of historical and geographic contexts and academic disciplines. Her other publications and research have ranged from the rights and agency of Romani children and adolescents to early childhood development, anti-Roma racism, reparations, segregation in education, and participatory action research.

She completed her Master’s in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and her doctoral degree in Political Sciences from the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Bucharest. She also holds a master’s degree in European Social Policies.

Professor Evelynn M. Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies. She has been on the Harvard faculty for 19 years where she currently serves as chair of the Department of the History of Science.  She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She has an undergraduate degree in physics from Spelman College and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech. She earned the S.M. in Physics from MIT.  She also taught at MIT for 10 years in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.  Her research focuses on the history of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race and gender in the United States. At Harvard she currently serves on the university-wide committee to examine Harvard’s relationship to slavery; the Faculty Executive Committee of the Peabody Museum and she chairs the Steering Committee on Human Remains in the Harvard Museum Collections.  She also works on projects to improve the representation of men and women of color in STEM fields. She is a member of the Committee on Women In Science, Technology, and Medicine (CWSEM) of the National Academy of Sciences. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. 

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He directs the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project and is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University. Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of racism, economic inequality, criminal justice and democracy in U.S. History. He is co-editor of “Constructing the Carceral State,” a special issue of the Journal of American History, and contributor to a National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014), as well as the award-winning author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. He is currently co-directing a National Academy of Sciences study on reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.His writing and scholarship have been featured in national print and broadcast media outlets, such as the New Yorker, Washington Post, The Nation, National Public Radio, PBS Newshour, Moyers and Company, MSNBC, and the New York Times, which includes his sugar essay for The1619 Project. He has appeared in a number of feature-length documentaries, including the recently-released Amend: The Fight for America (2021), the Oscar-nominated 13th (2016) and Slavery by Another Name (2012). Khalil was an associate editor of The Journal of American History and an Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society. In 2017, Khalil received the Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University’s TeachersCollege. And holds two honorary doctorates. He is on the boards of the Vera Institute of Justice, The Museum of Modern Art, Cure Violence Global, Oliver Scholars, The New York HistoricalSociety, and The Nation magazine, as well as the advisory boards of Common Justice, TheHistoryMakers and the Lapidus Center for the Study of Transatlantic Slavery. Khalil is an award-winning teacher at Harvard and has received numerous honors for his commitment to public engagement, including BPI Chicago’s Champion of the Public InterestAward (2018), The Fortune Society’s Game Changer Award (2017), Ebony Power 100 (2013), The Root 100 of Black Influencers (2012-2014), and Crain’s New York Business magazine 40 under 40 (2011). A native of Chicago’s South Side, Khalil graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Economics in 1993, and then joined Deloitte as a staff accountant until entering graduate school. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from Rutgers University.

Jacqueline Bhabha is a Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the Director of Research at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. She received a first class honors degree and an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the College of Law in London.

From 1997 to 2001, Bhabha directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the author of Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age (2014) and Can We Solve the Migration Crisis? (2018). She has edited or co-edited many books, including Children Without A State (2011), Human Rights and Adolescence (2014), Research Handbook on Child Migration (2018), A Better Future: The Role of Education for Displaced and Marginalized People (2020), and A Time for Reparation: Addressing State Responsibility for Collective Injustice (2021, forthcoming).

Bhabha was the founding chair of the Scholars at Risk Network, and she serves on the board of the World Peace Foundation, the Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion, Fortify Rights, the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Journal on Migration and Human Security.

Dr. Williams is the Norman Professor of Public Health and Chair, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the Chan School of Public Health, and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  Previously, he served on the faculty of Yale and the University of Michigan.  

The author of over 500 scientific papers, his research has addressed how social factors affect health, and he has developed a strong record of theoretical analysis and empirical research delineating the multiple ways in which racism (at structural and interpersonal levels) can adversely impact health.  

He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has been ranked as the Most Cited Black Scholar in the Social Sciences, and as one of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds. His research has been featured in the national print and television media. 

Sharrelle Barber, ScD, MPH is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the intersection of “place, race, and health” and examines the role of structural racism in shaping racial health inequities among Blacks in the United States and Brazil. Dr. Barber is a faculty member in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health and in May, was appointed by the Dean to be the Inaugural Director of the Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity set to launch Fall 2021. Dr. Barber’s research and scholarly commentary has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Social Science and Medicine, Lancet Infectious Disease, and Epidemiology and in February 2021, a profile of her research was featured in the Lancet. Over the past 5 years, she has served as Principal Investigator on several externally funded research projects and has secured over $3 million dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Heart Association. Dr. Barber has also spoken nationally and internationally about the impact of racism on racial health inequities. During the COVD-19 pandemic, Dr. Barber led a collaboration of researchers, graduate students and community partners from the Village of Arts and Humanities in the project COVID in Context, a data and storytelling project that documents how structural racism has contributed to racial inequities in COVID-19 and shapes the lived experiences of individuals and communities most harmed by the pandemic in Philadelphia. Dr. Barber has also provided expert commentary on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in Black communities in the U.S. for local, national, and international media outlets including the NY Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR and Al Jazeera. In March 2020, she convened a group of public health experts from Harvard (FXB Center for Health and Human Rights), UCLA (Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, and Health), and other academic institutions across the country to serve as an advisory committee to the Poor People’s Campaign, providing justice-centered public health expertise for the movement as it engaged in collective action and advocacy. Dr. Barber received a Doctor of Science degree in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a Master of Public Health from the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Bennett College. As a scholar-activist, Dr. Barber is committed to using her scholarship to make the invisible, visible; mobilize data for action; and contribute to the transnational dialogue around racism and health inequities.

Dr. Habib Naqvi is Director of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, which leads work across England on identifying and tackling ethnic health inequalities.  

Habib joined the English National Health Service in 2001, managing large public health research programmes in the South West of England. He also spent a number of years working at the Department of Health and Social Care where he led national equality and diversity policy.  

He volunteers as a trustee of the Mary Seacole Trust, and was listed in the Health Service Journal ‘80 most influential people in health in 2021’. 

Habib reverse mentors the former Chief Executive of the English National Health Service, Lord Simon Stevens, and was awarded an MBE in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to equality and diversity in the NHS. 

Monik C. Jiménez is an Associate Epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She received both her master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Certificate in Oral Epidemiology from Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Her work is centrally focused on the role of carceral control in creating and perpetuating racial/ethnic inequities in health. Her work aims to center the voices of directly impacted community members and she works with community advocacy groups to design, disseminate and conduct research focused on community identified needs. Her current work falls within three domains, 1) examining factors that impact the cardiovascular health of patients who have experienced incarceration and identify ways to support respectful patient-clinician communication about incarceration, 2) examining the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 among incarcerated people, through interdisciplinary data collection methods and community partnerships, 3) supporting the data and research needs of local area community advocacy groups led by directly impacted individuals. She is also Program Director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital STARS program, a summer research opportunity for underrepresented in medicine undergraduate students and is the course director of “Mass Incarceration and Health in the US” and “Cardiovascular Epidemiology” at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  

Christina H. Fuller (ScD) is an environmental health scientist dedicated to research that investigates relevant questions concerning environmental exposures and impacts. Her research aligns three related areas: (1) fate and transport of particles and gases in the environment; (2) disproportionate burden of environmental exposures and outcomes on marginalized populations; and (3) devising and testing novel solutions to near-roadway particulate matter exposures.

Dr. Fuller is dedicated to community engagement in research and the democratization of information that promotes environmental equity. Dr. Fuller has been Principal and Co-Investigator on multiple studies of air pollution and related exposures in urban centers in the United States and abroad. Currently, she leads a study in the Atlanta metro area testing the ability for near-roadway vegetative barriers to mitigate particulate matter exposures. She also examines the joint effects of air pollution and social factors on cardiovascular health in diverse populations. She was a Co-Investigator with the Environmental Health Core of the School of Public Health’s Center of Excellence for Health Disparities Research (CoEx) where she led projects characterizing relationships between air quality, transportation and demographic factors. Her work has been funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIHMD), the Centers for Disease Control and the JPB Foundation. She is co-editor of the recent book Ambient Combustion Ultrafine Particles and Health that summarizes the emerging issue of ambient ultrafine particles derived from combustion sources and their health effects.

Dr. Fuller teaches courses on exposure assessment, environmental justice and environmental health at both graduate and undergraduate levels. She is an active member of the International Society of Exposure Science (ISES), the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) and is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. She actively engages in a variety of translational research activities through community environmental education and board service.

Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH currently serves as the Chief HealthEquity Officer and Senior Vice President  for the American Medical Association (AMA) where she focuses on embedding health equity across all the work of the AMA and leading the Center for HealthEquity. She joined the AMA in April 2019, to launch AMA’s Center for Health Equity as their inaugural Chief Health Equity Officer. Prior to joining the AMA, Dr. Maybank served as the Founding Deputy Commissioner for the Center for Health Equity at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (2014). Aimed at strengthening equity efforts and transforming organizational culture, the Center became a model of success recognized by NYC leadership, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. She was instrumental in infusing equity at the neighborhood level and advancing the Department’s place-based approach to addressing health inequities. She also set precedence with groundbreaking work at the Office of Minority Health in the Suffolk County Department of Health Services (2006) while serving as the Founding Director. 

Dr. Maybank has taught medical and public health students on topics related to health inequities, public health leadership and management, physician advocacy, and community organizing in health. In 2012, along with a group of Black woman physician leaders, Dr. Maybank co-founded “We Are Doc McStuffins”, a movement inspired by the Disney Junior character Doc McStuffins serving to shine a light on the critical importance of diversity in medicine. 

She is a highly sought-after health expert in media appearing on national and influential media outlets such as NPR, MSNBC, NewsOne, Roland Martin, the Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association to name a few. More recently, due to her leadership in the COVID response efforts, she has been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and authored the New York Times Op- ed, “The Pandemic’s Missing Data” to bring more awareness to the structural inequities in the United States. She moderates the AMA bi-weekly web series, “Prioritizing Equity” that elevates the voices and stories of physicians centering equity in COVID-19 response efforts. 

Dr. Maybank holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, a MD from Temple University School of Medicine, and a MPH from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She is a pediatrician and preventive medicine/public health physician. 

Nancy Krieger is Professor of Social Epidemiology and American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor, in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and Director of the HSPH Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. Dr. Krieger is an internationally recognized social epidemiologist, with a background in biochemistry, philosophy of science, and the history of public health, combined with over 35 years of activism linking issues involving social justice, science, and health. In 2004, she became an ISI highly cited scientist (reaffirmed: 2015 ISI update), a group comprising “less than one-half of one percent of all publishing researchers,” and in 2019 she was ranked as being “in the top 0.01% of scientists based on your impact” for both total career and in 2017 by a new international standardized citations metrics author database, including as #1 among the 90 top scientists listed for 2017 with a primary field of public health and secondary field of epidemiology (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384). In 2013 she received the Wade Hampton Frost Award from the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association, and in 2015, she was awarded the American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professorship, and re-awarded its renewal in 2020; also in 2020, she was awarded the American College of Epidemiology’s “Outstanding Contributions to Epidemiology” award, and she and her team received the 2020 American Journal of Epidemiology “Paper of the Year” award for their study on historical redlining and cancer stage at diagnosis (the first ever study on this issue). In 2021, she was appointed as member of the UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the  Slave Route Project: Resistance, Liberty, Heritage. 

Informed by an analysis of the history and politics of epidemiology and public health, Dr. Krieger’s work addresses three topics: (1) conceptual frameworks to understand, analyze, and improve the people’s health, including her ecosocial theory of disease distribution, focused on embodiment and equity; (2) etiologic research on societal determinants of population health and health inequities, including structural racism and other types of adverse discrimination; and (3) methodologic research to improve monitoring of health inequities. She is author of Epidemiology and The People’s Health: Theory and Context (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2011), Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and The People’s Health (OUP, 2021) and editor for the OUP series “Small Books Big Ideas in Population Health” (starting with Political Epidemiology & The People’s Health, by Jason Beckfield, OUP, 2018; Climate Change & The People’s Health, by Sharon Friel, OUP, 2019; and Critical Epidemiology & The People’s Health by Jaime Brielh, OUP, 2021). She also is editor of Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives (Baywood Press, 2004) and co-editor, with Glen Margo, of AIDS: The Politics of Survival (Baywood Publishers, 1994), and, with Elizabeth Fee, of Women’s Health, Politics, and Power: Essays on Sex/Gender, Medicine, and Public Health (Baywood Publishers, 1994). In 1994 she co-founded, and still chairs, the Spirit of 1848 Caucus of the American Public Health Association, which focuses on links between social justice and public health. 

Natalia Linos is a Research Scientist and the Executive Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard, where she has helped build a new research area for the Center focused on structural racism and health. In 2020 and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Natalia ran for Congress to represent Massachusetts’ fourth Congressional district. She is currently a Town Meeting Member in Brookline and serves on the Board of the Environmental League of Massachusetts. Prior to her role at Harvard, Natalia worked at the United Nations leading UNDP’s work at the nexus of health and environment, and served as a speechwriter and policy specialist at the United Nations in New York and in Beirut, Lebanon. She also worked at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and currently is a member of Brookline’s Advisory Council on Public Health.

Natalia is a three-time Harvard University graduate, earning her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, Master of Science in Social Epidemiology, and Doctor of Science in Social Epidemiology here. She also holds a Certificate in Forced Migration from Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre. She speaks Greek fluently and has basic conversational skills in Arabic, Spanish and French. Natalia has three young children (Amalia, 8 and twins Leo & Alexandra, 3).