The Health & Society Scholars Program at Harvard University is an interdisciplinary university initiative that integrates activities from four schools, each with a national reputation for academic excellence: The School of Public Health, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Medical School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Based on a foundation of four core disciplines — social epidemiology, public policy, history of science, and neuroscience — our training program brings together some of the world's most renowned academics in those fields.

The two-year program at Harvard is structured to provide each scholar with the following competencies:

1. Knowledge of theories, research and analytical tools that integrate environmental, behavioral and biological conditions to address the determinants of population health.
2. Collaborative competence, by which we mean the ability to utilize and apply shared language, methods and techniques to conduct transdisciplinary research. This competence is necessarily grounded in a historical perspective on how scientists and policymakers have conceptualized causation and determinants of health over time.
3. Ability to plan effective interventions to improve population health, ranging from public policy approaches to community-based interventions.
4. Understanding of life course approaches to population health research.

The Harvard program is anchored by a weekly seminar series drawing on faculty from each of the four Harvard schools. Intensive training in transdisciplinary research will be organized through a dual mentor approach. Each scholar will be matched to one mentor from the School of Public Health, as well as one mentor from any of the other core areas: neuroscience, history of science or social policy.

The Harvard program offers access to a rich and diverse set of projects and databases in which scholars may undertake original research during their training. Each scholar will have the opportunity and resources to start an original research project based on their interests in population health.

The co-directors of the program are Drs. Lisa Berkman and Ichiro Kawachi, both of the Harvard School of Public Health. Faculty representing the executive committee includes: Professors Allan Brandt (Harvard Medical School and Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences) and Christopher Jencks (Harvard Kennedy School of Government). Another 24 faculty members from these four schools will participate in the program.

For more information, contact:

The Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program
Harvard School of Public Health
Kresge Building, 7th Floor
677 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Phone: (617) 432-3056
E-mail: society@hsph.harvard.edu
Web site: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/society/edu_rwj_index.html
(This Web site will open in a new browser window.)