Social epidemiologist Dr. Ichiro Kawachi will deliver the 2009 Bernard B. Ramsey Lecture at 6 p.m. March 23 in the Ramsey Concert Hall of the Performing Arts Center. His presentation, entitled “America Unequal: The Problem of Health Disparities and What Must be Done to Fix It,” is free and open to the public.
Kawachi is a professor of social epidemiology and chair of the department of society, human development and health at the Harvard School of Public Health. For the past decade, he has researched the damaging health consequences of inequality in populations by uncovering the social and economic determinants of population health.
An acclaimed author, Kawachi has published more than 350 papers as well as several books on the social and economic determinants of population health. He serves as the editor of the social epidemiology section of the international journal Social Science & Medicine and was the co-editor of the first textbook on the subject Social Epidemiology, published by Oxford University Press in 2000. Kawachi was featured in the 2008 PBS documentary “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” He has served as a consultant to the Pan-American Health Organization and the World Bank. Most recently, he served as special adviser to the Measurement Knowledge Network of the World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health.
Kawachi earned a medical degree in 1985 and doctoral degree in epidemiology in 1991 from the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has taught at the Harvard School of Public Health since 1992.
This is the second annual Ramsey lecture the department of health promotion and behavior has hosted since becoming a part of the College of Public Health in 2005. The series is funded by an endowment established to support academic programs in the Ramsey Center in honor of the university’s most generous individual benefactor, the late Bernard B. Ramsey.
