COVID-19 in Brazil: Population Health at Crossroads

Date: 

Tuesday, February 8, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:20pm


For a recording of this event, please click here.

Speaker: Marcia Castro, Andelot Professor of Demography; Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard University
Moderated by: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

Marcia Castro is a founding member of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital’s Scientific Advisory Board. At Harvard, Castro serves as a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Brazil Studies Program, a member of the Brazil Studies Program Steering Group of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), and a member of the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) Steering Committee. Castro has applied geographical information systems, remote sensing, and spatial statistics to her research, as well as proposed novel methods in spatial analysis. She has done extensive work in the Brazilian Amazon, and has experience working in Africa. Since 2004, she has been working on the Dar es Salaam Urban Malaria Control Program, promoting the use of environmental management approaches to improve urban health. She is currently working on a project that is measuring health, poverty and place by modeling inequalities in Accra, Ghana using RS and GIS. She is also investigating the use of remotely sensed imagery to predict urban malaria in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Castro is leading a project to assess the malaria poverty vicious cycle, and she started a project to propose a new methodology to assess spatio-temporal trends in a scenario of multiple control interventions. She is also working on the issues of human mobility and asymptomatic malaria infections in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as on the potential impacts of extreme climatic events on malaria transmission in the Amazon.

Steven Levitsky is the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. As the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, his research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions. He is author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), a New York Times Best-Seller that has been published in 25 languages, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge, 2010), and Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2003), and co-editor of Informal Institutions and Democracy in Latin America (with Gretchen Helmke) and The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (with Kenneth Roberts). He has written frequently for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, The New Republic, The Monkey Cage, La República (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil). He is currently writing a book (with Lucan Way) on the durability of revolutionary regimes. Levitsky received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs