Lisa F. Berkman

Lisa F. Berkman is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She previously served as Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS). She is an internationally recognized social epidemiologist whose work focuses extensively on social and policy influences on health outcomes. Her research orients toward understanding inequalities in health related to socioeconomic status, different racial and ethnic groups, and social networks, support, and isolation. She is the author or co-author of several books and over 300 publications and chapters, including as co-editor of Social Epidemiology, a groundbreaking textbook in the field.

Berkman is the principal investigator of the Health and Aging Study in Africa: A Longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community in South Africa (HAALSI), a program project funded by the National Institute on Aging. HAALSI aims to study the drivers and consequences of HIV and non-communicable diseases in an aging population in Agincourt, South Africa. She is also a member of the Conseil Scientifique de l'Institut de Recherche en Sante Publique (IReSP) in France. She has been actively involved since 1994 in the GAZEL study, a cohort of 20,000 French employees of EDF-GDF, the large natural gas–electricity company. She has served as a co-PI on the Work, Family & Health Network, a study involving workplace practices and employee and family health.

Prior to serving as Director of HCPDS, Dr. Berkman was chair of the Department of Society, Human Development and Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (1995–2008) and was head of the division of chronic disease epidemiology at Yale University.

Berkman received a B.A. in Epidemiology from Northwestern University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.