Meet the Executive Council
Daniel Kim
Founder & President
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Tarani Chandola
Secretary-General
Tarani Chandola, D.Phil. is a Professor of Medical Sociology. He is the head of the department of Sociology and the director of the Methods Hub and Social Science Research Centre in the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He joined the Department of Sociology in August 2021 and was formerly the Head of Department of Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the ESRC Strategic Advisory Network Strategic Advisory Network and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He was formerly the editor-in-chief of the journal Sociology, the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association, and is currently an international advisory board member of the journal Sociology of Health & Illness. He was a panel member of the Sociology Unit of Assessment for the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, UK. He obtained his DPhil in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford in 1998.
His research is primarily on the social determinants of health, focusing on health inequalities and psychosocial factors, and the analysis of longitudinal cohort studies. His major research contributions have been on understanding the role of chronic stress related biomarkers in relation to psychosocial stressors such as poor working conditions. He is currently researching HPA-axis biomarkers associated with social isolation, loneliness and (resilience to) chronic pain.
Mauricio Barreto
Regional Councilor, South America
Maurício L. Barreto MD, MPH PhD (University of London) is an Emeritus University Professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a Senior Investigator of Fundação Oswaldo Cruz(Fiocruz), always based and working in its home State, Bahia- Brazil. His research in Epidemiology and Collective Health covers different topics, with a great focus on the social and environmental determinants of health, health inequalities, and the impact of social, environmental and health policies and interventions on population´s health. He has published over 650 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. He taught, supervised and mentored undergraduate, Master, PhDs and Postdocs throughout his life. He is the founder and head of the Center of Data and Knowledge Integration for Health (Cidacs, Fiocruz) and co-director of the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Inequalities. His current major research program is around the 100 million Brazilian Cohort, particularly investigating the impact of poverty reduction policies on health, using the linkage of large administrative Brazilian databases. He is an elected Fellow of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences(ABC) and the World Academy of Sciences(TWAS) and an Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Luisa Borrell
Regional Councilor, North America
Luisa N. Borrell, D.D.S., Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH), New York, NY. She is a social epidemiologist with a research interest on the role of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic position, and neighborhood effects as social determinants of health. Her work on Hispanics’/Latinos’ racial identity brings attention to the need for disaggregated analyses by race as Hispanics/Latinos are a heterogeneous group with a mix of European, Native American and African ancestry. She also has expertise in research methods and analyses of large and spatially-linked datasets. Dr. Borrell has published over 190 articles and invited editorials. She has received funding from the National institutes of Health and has served both as a PI and as Co-PI. In addition, her work has also been funded through the Columbia Center for the Active Life of Minority Elder, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Columbia University Diversity Initiative Award and PSC-CUNY Awards. Dr. Borrell is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. She has a Doctor in Dental Surgery and a Master's in Public Health, from Columbia University, New York, NY, as well as doctorate in Epidemiological Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Finally, Dr. Borrell has an extensive record in mentoring master and doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows as well as junior faculty.
Tania King
Regional Councilor, Australia
Tania King, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Social Epidemiologist at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, at the University of Melbourne. She uses causally focussed quantitative methods to understand social and structural determinants of health inequities across the life-course. Specific focusses of her work include: 1) gender equality and norms as determinants of health outcomes; 2) paid and unpaid work arrangements and conditions, particularly unpaid care; 3) mental health and suicide. Tania currently holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, and a University of Melbourne Dame Kate Campbell Fellowship.
Naoki Kondo
Regional Councilor, Asia
Naoki Kondo, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor and Head of the Department of Social Epidemiology and Global Health in the Graduate School of Medicine and School of Public Health, Kyoto University. His primary research themes are social determinants of health. He is the vice chief investigator of the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study, a cohort study following up more than 100,000 older adults nationwide
in Japan. His recent study focuses on how to address health inequality in the community settings, conducting
intervention studies with local and central governments. Dr Kondo is the member of Clinical Consortium for Health Ageing, World Health
Organization. He holds multiple roles as committee members and advisors for Parliamentary Groups and Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan. He has published nearly 200 peer reviewed papers in journals such as the Lancet, BMJ, Int J Epidemiology, etc.
Anne Kouvonen
Regional Councilor, Europe
Anne Kouvonen, Ph.D. is Professor of Social Policy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is also Honorary Professor of Social Epidemiology and Social Sciences in the Centre for Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland). Anne’s research focuses on the social determinants of health. In particular, she has been investigating employee mental health and socioeconomic inequalities of health. Her other current interests regard aging; migrant health; digitalization and social inclusion of migrants. Her research involves the application of social epidemiological methods and administrative record linkage as well as large-scale prospective survey designs and qualitative research.
Rebecca Lacey
Regional Councilor, Europe
Becca Lacey, Ph.D. is a lifecourse social epidemiologist based at the Population Health Research Institute, St George’s, University of London. Becca’s research focuses mainly on how aspects of the early family social environment influence mental health across the lifecourse. She currently leads two programmes of work. One on caregiving (particularly young and young adult carers) and health. The second on early life adversities and health. All of her work uses large population datasets, including the British birth cohorts, the UK Millennium Cohort Study and panel datasets (e.g. the UK Household Longitudinal Study).
Landon Meyer
Regional Councilor, Africa
Landon Myer, M.D., Ph.D. has training in social anthropology, clinical medicine and epidemiology. His research focuses on women's, maternal and child health in the context of HIV. He has lead multiple clinical and health systems studies investigating the health of HIV-infected women receiving ART during pregnancy and postpartum, as well as the health and development of HIV-exposed and -infected children and adolescents.
Meet the Awards Committee Co-Chairs
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Meet the Communications & Membership Committee Co-Chairs
Yulin Hswen
Yulin Hswen, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Bakar Computational Health Institute at the University of California San Francisco and faculty in the joint Computational Precision Health Program with UC Berkeley. Dr. Hswen graduated with a Doctoral Degree in social and computational epidemiology at the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health. She is also an Associate Editor for JAMA and JAMA Network where she leads the strategy for multimedia in AI and medicine.
Dr. Hswen’s current research is at the intersection between the digital environment and society, where she focuses on using new artificial intelligence and machine learning methods to uncover social patterns of disease and to develop unbiased and fair systems of health.
Dr. Hswen is in the pursuit of detecting uncomfortable truths and seeks to identify authentic attitudes, feelings, and beliefs that influence population behavior and health. Through the collection of unconventional and underground online social networks, Dr. Hswen captures unfiltered conversations to further understand the connections between social experiences and health.
Dr. Hswen’s research has been published in top medical and public health Journals such as, The New England Journal of Medicine, The American Journal of Public Health, Preventive Medicine, Nature npj Digital Medicine, Nature Human Behavior, Nature Scientific Data, JAMA Network Open and JAMA, and her work has been featured in CBC News, Bloomberg News, Nature Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Hswen has served as Deputy Editor of the Harvard Public Health Review and is on the Editorial Board for Nature Journals Scientific Reports, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Dr Hswen was previously a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University and a Chateaubriand STEM Fellow, the Embassy of France, and The French National Research Agency for researchers to study the environment and health in France. Before joining UCSF, Dr. Hswen was a visiting Assistant Professor at Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE) where she conducted research in behavioral economics in relation to the promotion of public health interventions. Dr. Hswen is interested in the application of behavioral economic theories to enhance the acceptance and adherence of healthy behaviors and the willingness to share information.
Emily Knapp
Emily A. Knapp, PhD, MHS is an Assistant Scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a social epidemiologist, her research examines societal and economic determinants of obesity and other chronic disease, with an emphasis on strengthening measurement of these exposures. Dr. Knapp has a strong interest in research that guides policy and program-based interventions for the prevention and control of obesity. Her work focuses on the measurement of the obesity-related environment, which is crucial for identifying policies and programs that may prevent and/or control obesity and related chronic disease. Overall, her research centers on the application of epidemiologic methods to the prevention of chronic disease, including methods such as multilevel and longitudinal data analysis and measurement of the economic, social, and built environment.
Meet the Education
Committee Co-Chairs
Jhumka Gupta
Jhumka Gupta, Sc.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global and Community Health within the College of Public Health at George Mason University. Her research program applies a social epidemiology framework towards advancing the science of gender-based violence against women and girls (e.g. intimate partner violence, sex trafficking). Specifically, she investigates the mental and reproductive health implications of gender-based violence, and conducts intervention studies aimed at reducing violence against women. Her primary focus is with vulnerable populations, both within and outside of the United States, and includes refugees, immigrants, and communities impacted by conflict. She has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications on these topics. She also serves as Associate Editor of BMC International Health and Human Rights. Prior to coming to Mason, Dr. Gupta was an Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Public Health.
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Ankur Singh
Ankur Singh, Ph.D. is an Australian Research Council DECRA Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne (Australia). He holds a joint position between Melbourne School of Population and Global Health and Melbourne Dental School. Ankur has research training in social epidemiology and he applies a range of quantitative and evidence synthesis skills to quantify the impact of policy interventions on health inequalities. His research contributions are in the area of population oral health, tobacco control and social determinants of health.
Meet the Student & Postdoc Committee Co-Chairs
Ariel Beccia
Ariel Beccia, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Division of Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, working with Harvard’s Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED) and the Sexual Orientation and Gender identity and Expression (SOGIE) Health Equity Research Collaborative. Her research focuses on identifying the social and structural determinants of gender- and sexual orientation-based inequities in mental health outcomes, with a particular focus on eating disorders. She is also interested in developing methods for incorporating intersectionality and other critical feminist theories into quantitative health research. Ariel earned her PhD in epidemiology from the University of Massachusetts and a BS in Neuroscience with a minor in Gender & Sexuality Studies at St. Lawrence University.
Mary Brushe
Mary Brushe, Ph.D. is a senior research officer at Telethon Kids Institute where her research focuses on early childhood health and development, the impact of screen time, and children and adolescents' mental health and wellbeing. She has an Honours in Psychology and recently (August 2023) submitted her PhD in Public Health through the University of Adelaide. Mary currently holds the roles of Vice President and Advocacy Coordinator for the South Australian Branch of the Public Health Association of Australia and the Treasurer of the Child and Youth Health Special Interest Group. She is experienced in the management of prospective cohort studies, epidemiological research methods, research translation for policy and practice and public health advocacy.