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Lisa F. Berkman, Ph.D.,  is the Thomas D Cabot Professor of Public Policy, Epidemiology and Population and Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

Career
A graduate of Northwestern University, Berkman received her master’s and doctorate in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the Yale faculty in 1979 as an assistant professor. , later serving as head of the department of chronic disease epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine.

Berkman was appointed director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies in 2007. She previously served as chair of the School’s Department of Society, Human Development and Health from 1995 – 2008. Recognized for her groundbreaking work in the field of social epidemiology, she is noted for identifying the effects of social networks on mortality risks that helped define the field in the late 1970s. Berkman also broadened the field with her investigations of how social conditions related to inequality, race, ethnicity, and social isolation influence health and aging.

As a social epidemiologist whose work focuses extensively on social influences on health outcomes, Berkman's research has been oriented towards understanding social inequalities in health and aging related to socioeconomic status, different racial and ethnic groups, and social networks, support and social isolation. She leads a large program project in Sub-Saharan Africa on aging and chronic disease. This study, called HAALSI, is supported by the National Institute on Aging. She is on the monitoring committee of sister studies in China, Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. She is also involved in interventions and policy evaluations to test the degree to which labor policies and practices can improve population health and wellbeing. Among current areas, she has identified work/family dynamics as a major health risk for working women. She has been an innovator in linking social experiences with physical and mental health. Along with Ichiro Kawachi and Maria Glymour, Berkman co-edited the first textbook in the field of social epidemiology, titled “Social Epidemiology”.

Dr. Berkman has done an extensive body of research on the impact of social networks, social inequality, and social engagement on aging, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. She is currently doing work on how social and economic policies influence health outcomes. Her work focuses on psychosocial influences on health outcomes and their role in predicting declines in physical and cognitive functioning and the onset of disease and mortality. She is also Chair of the Steering Committee on Enhanced Recovery in Coronary Heart Disease of the NHLBI. Dr. Berkman led the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Project on Longitudinal Community-Based Studies of Aging in Humans which was part of the larger MacArthur Foundation research network on successful aging.

She is currently president of the Association of Population Centers (APC), a member of the Institute of Medicine, and serves as chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health. She is a past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research.

Works

 * Health and Ways of Living: The Alameda County Study, with Lester Breslow, 1983. ISBN 978-0195032161
 * Neighborhoods and Health (Medicine), with Ichiro Kawachi'', 2003. ISBN 978-0195138382
 * Social Epidemiology (1st Edition), with Ichiro Kawachi, 2000. ISBN 978-0195083316
 * Social Epidemiology (2nd Edition), with Ichiro Kawachi, Maria Glymour, 2014. ISBN 978-0199395330