Sawsan Abdulrahim’s work centers human rights principles to illuminate and act upon social inequities in health across the life course, with a focus on refugee populations and labor migrants in the Arab region and beyond. She is the lead author of the Arab Watch Report 2023 on the Right to Health, a live document intended to inform policy and advocacy efforts toward achieving health for all in the Arab region.…
Tori Cowger (she/her) is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on understanding and eliminating health inequities. Specifically, she is interested in social and structural determinants of infectious diseases and substance use related harms, health impacts of racism in the criminal legal system, geospatial methods, and social networks. Her current work blends public health research, practice, and advocacy dedicated to eliminating the unnecessary, and inequitable, and unacceptable toll of structural racism…
Dr. Brittney N. Francis (she/her) is a social epidemiologist whose primary research seeks to document and combat how neighborhood level inequalities are shaped by anti-Black structural racism and create adverse perinatal impacts for Black birthing people residing in resource deprived neighborhoods over their lifecourse. Dr. Francis holds a dual academic appointment as an FXB Health and Human Rights Fellow & David E. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan…
Catharina is an Emergency Physician who is joining the fellowship after completing her residency in Emergency Medicine at Los Angeles County & University of Southern California Residency and medical school at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Her medical training has fostered a particular interest in how climate change affects the health of traditionally underserved communities. Her efforts have been aimed at raising awareness of climate change as a…
Jennifer Leaning, MD, SMH, is a senior fellow at the Harvard FXB Center and Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, she is a faculty member in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She served as the director of the Harvard FXB Center from January 1,…
Dr. Shadiya L. Moss is a social epidemiologist and Health and Human Rights Fellow at the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University. Her research focuses on (1) how systemic and structural racism via the carceral state, and racist social policies and practices target the Black family and community, and (2) how these structures further perpetuate racial inequities in health, including psychiatric and substance use health outcomes.…
Dr. Marie Plaisime is an FXB Health and Human Rights Fellow and National Science Foundation (NSF) post-doctoral fellow. Her research investigates racial bias training in medical education and clinical practice, race-based medicine, algorithmic bias, and health policy. She applies critical quantitative, computational, & mixed methodologies to detect, examine, and quantify how structural racism in medicine jeopardizes healthcare delivery, access, and quality. She completed her PhD in Medical Sociology at Howard…
Dr. Jake Ryann Sumibcay (he/him/his) is a public health scholar whose research focuses on driving effective health engagement through ethnographic strategies in communities of color, primarily among the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) populations. He is interested in understanding the nuances in racialized and cultural representations of these groups and how they are reflected in public health policy, practice, and research. As a fellow, he focuses on exploring the…
Tess Wiskel is a Climate Change and Human Health Fellow at the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights and the Center for Climate Health and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE) at Harvard University as well as an emergency medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Her focus is on understanding and addressing the health impacts of climate change, particularly extreme weather events, in at-risk patient populations and to evaluate…
Emily Wright (she/her/hers) is a postdoctoral research fellow who leverages epidemiologic theory and descriptive, quasi-experimental, and longitudinal methods to investigate how policies and other societal determinants shape racialized, gendered, and occupational health inequities. Dr. Wright is primarily affiliated with the Social Policies for Health Equity Research (SPHERE) Center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and also affiliated with the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at…
