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Dr. Acevedo-Garcia has been a member of the HSPH faculty since 1998. Her research interests include the effect of social determinants (e.g. residential segregation, immigrant integration) on health disparities, especially along racial and ethnic lines.
She earned her Ph.D. in Public Affairs with a concentration in Demography from Princeton University. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the Charles Westoff Prize for Excellence in Demographic Research, among other honors.
Dr. Becker’s research in medical anthropology has focused on the cultural mediation of disordered eating and body image and postpartum illness.
She received her medical training at Harvard Medical School and completed a psychiatric residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. She also received a doctoral degree in anthropology from Harvard. Dr. Becker explored body image and its cultural context in her book Body, Self and Society: The View from Fiji.
Dr. Becker is the co-editor in chief of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and is the director of the Adult Eating and Weight Disorders Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, and is clinically active in this field.
Kim Kraunz is currently a postdoctoral Fellow is Ann Pearson's lab in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She received her Sc.D. in Genetics and Complex Diseases from HSPH in 2005. Dr. Kraunz has always been interested in the intersection between biology and the environment.
Her graduate work focused on the relationship between environmental exposures and the molecular events that occur in cancer. She now studies anearobic methane oxidization and environmental hydrocarbon contaminant biodegration by environmental microbes, which helps us to better understand the microbial contribution to the carbon cycle.
She earned her doctorate from the Harvard School of Public Health, and serves as a Senior Proctor for the Freshman Dean’s Office and a Member of the Board of Freshman Advisors.
Wendy Berry Mendes, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University and director of the Health and Psychophysiology Lab. She obtained her Ph.D. in social psychology from UC Santa Barbara and then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in psychology and medicine at UC San Francisco.
Her research falls at the intersection of psychology, biology and health, specifically the extent to which social factors affect stress, motivation, and emotion as evidenced in observable changes in endocrine, immune and autonomic nervous systems. From a psychological perspective, she focuses on social factors such as social isolation, rejection, concealment, discrimination, and stigmatization. In the context of these social factors, her work examines acute changes in biological functioning in laboratory-based studies. These studies represent more traditional social psychological methodologies.
Similar to medical and health research, her research also relies on field and prospective studies in which she examines how these factors experienced chronically can alter physiology and how the effects of these alterations may relate to mental and physical disease etiology and disease progression. This triangulation presents the hope of both stronger inference (causality) that can be established with experimental methods and ecological validity and generalizability that is established with health and medical research techniques.