Dr. Linda Marc is the Associate Vice Chair of Research within the Department of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical Center. In this role she supports the initiatives of the Vice Chair of Research, and Chair for the Department of Psychiatry, in the development and implementation of department-wide health equity research objectives, policies, systems, plans and programs. Dr. Marc will continue to maintain a faculty appointment within the Department of Biostatistics, as a core faculty member in the Quantitative Methods Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Immediately prior to this role, Dr. Marc served as CEO and Chief Science Officer of Behavioral Science International, LLC (https://behavioralscienceintl.com/), a public health consulting firm, which she founded in 1997 concurrent during her doctoral work at Harvard Chan. As an extension of her consultation in pharma, Dr. Marc's research interests included diversity in clinical trials and measurement of patient reported outcomes (i.e., quality of life). A partial list of clients include, Aventis, Astra Merck, GSK, Novartis, Pfizer, Warner Lambert and Wyeth Ayerst Research. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled, "Social Determinants of Therapeutic Effectiveness During Initial Therapy of HIV-1 Infection, funded by GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Novartis.
From 2017-2021, Dr. Marc was the National Implementation Director of a $21 million ($5.325 million/year) HRSA-funded HIV initiative. She was responsible for the design and delivery of technical assistance to adapt and implement 11 HIV behavioral interventions at 26 Ryan White HIV program-funded sites across the U.S. (including Alaska and Puerto Rico).
From 2011-2017, Dr. Marc was the Education and Curriculum Development Director within the Harvard Center for Public Health, and lead faculty ensuring that topics specific to social determinants of health were included in online instructional modules. During this period, she also served as an Advisor on HIV and social determinants of health to the Haitian Ministry of Population and Public Health. Haiti projects focused on: (1) the utilization of mental health services for female victims of sexual violence; (2) uptake to post-exposure antiretroviral prophylaxis for victims of sexual violence; (3) measurement of sexual violence amongst internally displaced women living in post-earthquake camps; and (4) measurement of depression in the Haitian LGBT communities in collaboration with the Haiti PEPFAR Team on the first Bio-Behavioral Surveillance Study of MSM in Haiti.
Appointed by the Secretary of Commerce Carlos Guitierrez, Dr. Marc was an Advisor to the US Census Bureau, serving as Vice-Chair of the Committee for the African-American Population (2007-2011), and also the Convenor of the Race & Hispanic Origin Research Working Group (2012-2015) for the National Advisory Committee on Race, Ethnicity and Other Populations. In both roles, these committees were charged to explore alternative approaches for collecting race and ethnicity data from hard-to-reach and hard-to-count populations for the 2010 and 2020 decenniel census.Concurrent during this period, Dr. Marc was an Assistant Professor of Clinical Population & Family Health at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Dr. Marc is formerly a Lecturer in Public Health Practice at the Yale School of Public Health (2006-2017), and served as the Principal Investigator for a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative as part of strategic planning efforts to improve school governance.