Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Ichiro Kawachi, MB.ChB., Ph.D., is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Social Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Kawachi received both his medical degree and Ph.D. (epidemiology) from the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has taught at Harvard since 1992.

Kawachi is the co-editor (with Lisa Berkman) of the first textbook on Social Epidemiology, published by Oxford University Press in 2000 (2nd edition published in 2014, with Lisa Berkman & Maria Glymour). His other books include Neighborhoods & Health (edited by Dustin Duncan & Ichiro Kawachi, Oxford University Press, 2018), Social Capital and Health with S.V. Subramanian & Daniel Kim (Springer, 2008); Behavioral Economics and Public Health with Christina Roberto (Oxford University Press, 2016); Social Epidemiology of Sleep (with Dustin Duncan & Susan Redline, Oxford University Press, 2019), and the Oxford Handbook of Public Health Practice (Oxford University Press, 4th edition forthcoming in 2019)

In 2013, he launched a massive, open online course (MOOC) through HarvardX called “Health and Society” (PHx 201), in which 32,000 participants registered from throughout the world. Kawachi is the Co-Editor in Chief (with S.V. Subramanian) of the international journal Social Science & Medicine, as well as the sister open access journal, SSM – Population Health. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.