Tutors
Introduction to Social Medicine Tutors — Brief Bios
The following listing excludes tutors who are members of the DGHSM core faculty, since information about them may be found under the faculty pages of this site. It includes course faculty members who are currently teaching or have taught in the past two years. It includes full time, part time, and substitute tutors.
Mary Catherine Arbour, M.D., is Associate Physician for Research at the Division of Global Health Equity of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. She performs global health research aimed at designing and evaluating interdisciplinary, community-based interventions in resource-poor settings with the goal of reducing inequities around the world. She directs the health component of Un Buen Comienzo, a cluster-randomized controlled trial of a preschool health and education intervention in Santiago, Chile. Early formative work as an anthropologist and community organizer informed her prior work, which includes qualitative and quantitative research on HIV and primary care delivery in Burkina Faso, South Africa, Indonesia and Peru, as well as clinical care in Rwanda, Peru, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras and with underserved populations within the United States. She holds a BA in biological anthropology from Swarthmore College, an MD from Harvard Medical School and an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health.
Heidi L. Behforouz, M.D., is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and a graduate of the Open Society Institute’s Medicine as a Profession physician advocacy fellowship. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Behforouz has focused her career on health disparities and practices primary care in the BIMA clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). She is currently Executive Director of the Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment (PACT) project in Boston, Massachusetts. Sponsored by Partners In Health and the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at BWH, this program employs community health promoters and peer prevention leaders to advocate for the health and wellbeing of inner city residents infected with or at risk for HIV.
Gene Bukhman, M.D., Ph.D., is an instructor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He trained in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and completed his cardiology fellowship at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. As the Director of Cardiology for Partners In Health, he leads an initiative in Rwanda to integrate services for rheumatic heart disease, non-ischemic cardiomyopathies, and hypertension into the process of rural health system strengthening.
Paul Cruickshank is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is currently writing a dissertation on the political and institutional changes in international health in the 1970s. In addition to the history of global health, his research interests focus on science policy in international development, and the history of science, technology and medicine in contemporary China.
Peter Drobac, M.D., is a research fellow in the Division of Infectious Disease and the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He completed combined residency training in internal medicine and pediatrics at Brigham and Women’s and Children’s Hospitals. His time is divided between childhood tuberculosis research in Peru and HIV program development and medical education in Rwanda. Dr. Drobac is currently interested in optimizing strategies for the scale-up of community-based treatment programs for childhood infectious diseases and the prevention of vertical HIV transmission, both within the context of comprehensive child survival programs.
Pracha P. Eamranond, M.D., M.P.H., is an Instructor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Eamranond finished his residency training in Internal Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital. He recently completed a fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Harvard Medical School as well as his M.P.H. in Clinical Effectiveness at Harvard School of Public Health. He continues to conduct health disparities research in immigrant health at Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center. His research focuses on inequalities in cardiovascular risk factor diagnosis and treatment among Latino and Asian immigrants. He has a Spanish- and Thai-speaking clinic population through Brigham Internal Medicine Associates.
Andrew Ellner, M.D., is Associate Physician at the Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women's Hospital, an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and on the faculty of the Global Health Delivery project. His work focuses on improving health systems for underserved populations. For the last year he directed the academic consortium of the WHO Maximizing Positive Synergies Initiative. Previously, he was the Clinical Policy Director of the Clinton Foundation's Rural Initiative. He practices primary care in the Brigham Internal Medicine Associates. His previous research focused on essential drug policy and health care access in the United States. He is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. He earned an MSc from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing.
Jennifer Furin, M.D., Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital Division of Global Health Equity. Her research interests lie in implementation and operational research. She is focused on HIV care and prevention as well as the diagnosis and management of TB and MDRTB. Her work has primarily been international in nature, having taken place in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, and Lesotho. Dr. Furin also is an anthropologist interested in ethnography and open-ended interviewing techniques.
Jeremy Greene, M.D., Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science of Harvard University, Instructor in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics of Harvard Medical School, and Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine of Brigham & Women’s Hospital. His research interests focus on the history of the pharmaceutical industry and its interactions with medical research, clinical practice, and public health, and his first book, Prescribing By Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (published January 2007 by Johns Hopkins University Press) traces the development of chronic disease categories as markets for risk-reducing pharmaceuticals. Currently he is working on a history of generic medicines, therapeutic exchange, and essential medications; his other work has focused on medication nonadherence, access to pharmaceuticals, and the historical development and impact of pharmaceutical marketing, advertising, and salesmanship. Dr. Greene received his MD and his PhD from Harvard in 2005 and is affiliated with Castle Society.
Mona Haidar, M.D., was Research Fellow in Global Health Delivery during 2008-09. She had previously worked as Bobete Clinic Director for the Lesotho HIV Rural Initiative of Partners In Health Lesotho. Dr. Haidar has returned to her home country of Lebanon, where she is involved with developing the social medicine curriculum to be used at Lebanese American University.
Seth M. Holmes, M.D., Ph.D., is a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University. He completed his Ph.D. in Cultural and Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco, his M.D. at the University of California, San Francisco, and his Internal Medicine Residency at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Holmes is completing a book exploring social hierarchies and health disparities in U.S. agriculture as well as the ways in which these asymmetries come to be seen as normal and natural. The book draws on eighteen months of intensive participant-observation migrating with undocumented indigenous Mexicans through the United States and Mexico. His recent article from this work received the Rudolf Virchow Award for Critical Anthropology for Global Health. Concurrently, he is conducting an auto-ethnography exploring the processes in medical training that shape the lenses through which medical trainees perceive social difference. Dr. Holmes is initiating ethnographic research in New York jails and prisons exploring the social, cultural, and political logics for high HIV death rates of specific classes of people, notably the urban poor, ethnic and sexual minorities, and immigrants. He also maintains a continuity clinic in HIV primary care in the New York City public hospital system.
Jen Kasper, M.D., M.P.H., is Assistant Pediatrician at Mass General Hospital for Children, Clinical Specialist in Global HIV Programs at the FXB Center at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, and past-president of Doctors for Global Health. She has published works on the topics of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Relevance for US Domestic Policies; poverty, child health and child rights; immigrants and hunger; child labor; and orphans and vulnerable children in the context of HIV/AIDS. Her diverse global health expertise includes health service delivery, rural community development, complex humanitarian emergencies, field-based operations research, and health system strengthening, national curriculum development and training of in country staff in pediatric HIV/AIDS and PMTCT. She has been actively involved in global health and human rights work since 1996 in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chiapas (Mexico), India, and Mozambique. From May 2007 to September 2008, she worked with Health Alliance International in Mozambique, serving as a Pediatric HIV/AIDS Technical Advisor and the Manager of the HIV/AIDS Program. She received a combined BA/MD from Boston University/Boston University School of Medicine and an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health.
Roderick K. King, M.D., M.P.H., is Instructor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Senior Faculty at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Disparities Solutions Center and an Inaugural Institute of Medicine (IOM) Anniversary Fellow in the National Academy of Sciences where he serves on the Board on Global Health and on the study committee, “The US Commitment to Global Health.” Dr. King's research interests are leadership/workforce and health systems strengthening domestically and globally, workforce diversity, health disparities and the impact of social determinants of health. Prior to returning to Harvard Medical School, he most recently served as the Director for the Health Resources and Services Administration, Boston Regional Division and as a Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. King earned his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, his M.D. from Cornell University Medical College, and his M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health as a Commonwealth Fund-Harvard University Fellow in Minority Health Policy.
Eric L. Krakauer, M.D., Ph.D., is Director of International Programs at the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care, Attending Physician on the General Medical Unit and Palliative Care Service and Co-Chair of the ethics committee at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Instructor in Medicine and in Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Krakauer presently is assisting Vietnam’s Ministry of Health to integrate palliative care in its national healthcare system. His current research focuses on clinical and policy aspects of palliative care for poor and medically underserved populations, clinical and ethical issues in end-of-life care, and clinical education in Vietnam.
Gail Levine, M.D., is Instructor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a graduate of the Division of General Medicine primary care residency program there. For the past 11 years she has practiced at Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center, where she sees patients and precepts BWH internal medicine residents who have their clinic there. For the past year she’s been working on redesigning ambulatory training for internal medicine residents at BWH.
Evan Lyon, M.D., was a senior resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Internal Medicine and a long-term volunteer clinician and researcher with Partners In Health. He graduated from HMS in 2003. The majority of Dr. Lyon’s clinical, research, and advocacy work has centered on Haiti, where he worked for over 10 years. His interests include: globalization and economic / social inequality; community-based HIV/TB care in the context of comprehensive rural primary care; health and human rights, broadly; political and social movements in Latin America; community health worker training and support; and the health consequences of militarism, war, and political violence. In addition to work with Partners In Health, Evan is an active member of the People’s Health Movement. In 2009, he moved to Alabama to join the Equal Justice Initiative.
Aaron Mauck is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His current research concerns the sociocultural and institutional origins of disease management practices in the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on epidemiology, risk assessment, and health policy. His previous work has explored quality-improvement measures such as pay-for-performance and evidence-based medicine, and the sociological foundations of the American medical profession. He is currently completing a dissertation on the history of type 2 diabetes in the United States from 1900-2000.
Aditi Nerurkar, M.D., M.P.H., is a fellow in Integrative Medicine at Harvard Medical School's Osher Research Center. Her current research interest is in mind-body therapies and their application to chronic diseases of lifestyle. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine from University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 2008, and spent time in Ghana as a primary care physician. Prior to clinical medicine, she received her MPH from Columbia University. She was a consultant in Geneva at a WHO collaborating center on HIV and migration. She worked on a USAID project with various African ministries of health on HIV's impact on military, refugees, and internally displaced people in Sub-Saharan Africa. She practices Integrative Medicine at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at MGH.
Daniel Palazuelos, M.D., M.P.H., is an Associate Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Brown Medical School and completed a residency in Internal Medicine and Global Health Equity at BWH. He is the Clinical Director of the Partners In Health-supported project in Chiapas, Mexico. In this role, he lives for half of the year in isolated communities in the Sierra Madre Mountains, training local Community Health Promoters, providing medical care, conducting research, hosting medical student projects, and creating original curricula. For the other half of the year, he lives in Boston and practices inpatient medicine with the Hospitalist Group at BWH.
Giuseppe Raviola, M.D., is an Instructor in Psychiatry at HMS and an Attending Physician at the Richmond Psychiatry Inpatient Service at Children's Hospital Boston. A 2002 HMS graduate, he trained in adult psychiatry at MGH/McLean Hospital, serving as Chief Resident in International and Community Mental Health, and in child and adolescent psychiatry at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where he acquired experience in rural mental health service delivery. He has studied and written on the mental health and well-being of health care workers, and on child and adolescent mental health promotion in sub-Saharan Africa. As an advocate for community and global mental health concerns, he seeks to promote the need for incorporating effective, evidence-based mental health programs within existing community and health care infrastructures.
Joe Rhatigan, M.D., is director of the Global Health Equity Residency Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and works clinically as a hospitalist there. He graduated from HMS in 1992 and finished his residency in internal medicine at the BWH in 1995. As one of the key faculty members of the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard, he develops case studies analyzing the design implementation of health care service delivery in resource constrained settings.
Anat Rosenthal, Ph.D., is a Fulbright research fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and the Global Health Delivery Project. She has conducted fieldwork in Israel and Malawi on the social and cultural effects of HIV/AIDS, health policy and undocumented migration. Her current research focuses on the impact of AIDS on kinship systems and social institutions and the strategies rural communities adopt to cope with orphans and vulnerable children, and on the impact of the role-out of ART in rural Malawi on clients and health professionals. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her published work focuses on migration and health; health policy and HIV care; research methods and HIV/AIDS in rural communities in Malawi.
Rebecca Weintraub, M.D., is an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity and currently the Executive Director of the Global Health Delivery (GHD) Project. The GHD Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration to systematize the study of health care delivery and to disseminate new learning to global health practitioners. Rebecca's previous work promoted access to care for HIV positive mothers and their children in Zimbabwe and India. She continues to serve as a technical advisor to Ashoka. Fifteen years ago, she launched Jumpstart, which brings college students and community volunteers together with preschool children for year long, individualized tutoring and mentoring and is now an AmeriCorps program serving over 80 communities and 15,000 preschoolers a year. Jumpstart has scaled up by an average of nearly 30 percent, making it one of America's fastest growing nonprofit organizations. Rebecca's current research interests include developing new strategies to design and scale health systems.