Rita Hamad, MD, PhD, appointed the new director of the Harvard Pop Center
We are starting 2026 with exciting news. Rita Hamad, MD, PhD, a leading social epidemiologist, has been appointed the next director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She will serve as the Center’s eighth leader in its 62-year history, succeeding Lisa Berkman, who guided the Center with distinction since 2007.
Hamad is professor of social epidemiology and public policy in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her expertise lies in examining the health effects of social and economic policies to generate evidence used to inform new legislation that could alleviate poverty. Earlier in her career, Hamad practiced family medicine, seeing patients in safety net clinics throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. She also served as associate professor of family and community medicine at University of California San Francisco prior to moving to Harvard.
We’re looking forward to this next chapter at the Harvard Pop Center and are grateful to Lisa Berkman for skillfully shaping the Center into an interdisciplinary hub that brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and schools to address some of today’s most pressing challenges. Berkman will continue to serve as the principal investigator on our flagship project Health and Aging in Africa: Longitudinal Studies in South Africa (HAALSA).