Lynch Family Foundation Health Equity Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Position Description
The Department of Global Health and Social Medicine stands out at Harvard University for its unique biosocial, interdisciplinary approach to research and training and its focus on improving health delivery and promoting health equity worldwide. Problems of health equity are biosocial phenomena and addressing them requires insights from both biological and social sciences. Our department faculty are trained in disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, economics, ecology, epidemiology, implementation science, and bioethics. Department faculty use tools and insights from these disciplines to understand how poverty and inequality affect health care access and outcomes. In collaboration with community-based and other clinical organizations, department faculty apply these understandings to develop and evaluate interventions that improve health care delivery and close gaps in health equity.
In memory of the late Professor Paul Farmer, the department established a post-doctoral fellowship to support research fundamental to health equity that is rooted in the biosocial, interdisciplinary approach that Professor Farmer modeled. Fellows will be early-career researchers who will spend two years based in the department. Their primary responsibility will be to pursue an original research project of their own design. We seek fellows whose field research sites will be in low-income settings of the Global South. Fellows will be assigned a mentor: a department faculty member who has overlapping research expertise or interest in the area of the Fellow's proposed research topic. In addition to a fellowship stipend, research funding and professional development funding will be available.
The aim of this program is to expand the pool of talented academic leaders equipped to conduct research that advances health equity using biosocial, interdisciplinary approaches that are core to social medicine. Fellows will be mentored to pursue the next phase of their careers. They will have the opportunity to participate in department seminars alongside faculty and other trainees as well as career-development workshops at Harvard Medical School.
Department Senior Faculty lead research in the following areas:
- Ecology of poverty and development
- Health care delivery systems
- Health impacts of the climate crisis
- History of medicine
- Intersection of culture, coloniality and well-being in North American Indigenous communities
- Medical anthropology
- Mental health: epidemiology, interventions, implementation science
- Political economy of health
- Tuberculosis: epidemiology, clinical trials, co-infection, social stigma, community interventions
Location
This position is located in Boston with travel to research locations as needed.
Find Your Best Opportunity
Tell them AcademicJobs.com sent you!



