Position Description

The Department of Global Health and Social Medicine stands out for its unique biosocial, interdisciplinary approach to research and training and its unique focus on improving global health delivery and promoting health equity worldwide. Problems of health equity are biosocial phenomena and addressing them requires insights from both the 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 postdoctoral 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 to advance a more equitable and efficient U.S. health care system. We seek fellows whose field research sites will be in low-income settings. Fellows will be assigned two mentors. The primary mentor will be a Global Health and Social Medicine faculty member who has overlapping research expertise or interest in the area of the Fellow's proposed research topic. The co-mentor will be a faculty member either from within the department or from another Harvard University school and department, who specializes in the field most relevant to the selected fellow's proposal. In addition to a fellowship stipend, research and professional development funding will be available.

Postdoctoral fellows will pursue projects investigating critical issues such as expanding access to care, strengthening health systems, and testing community-based interventions-all with the goal of informing scalable changes that could benefit millions of Americans.

The aim of this program is to expand the pool of talented academic leaders equipped to conduct research that advances health equity using the frames of social medicine. Fellows will be mentored to pursue the next phase of their careers. They will have the opportunity to participate in all department seminars alongside faculty and other trainees, as well as career-development workshops at Harvard Medical School.