Yale Department of Anthropology

Dear Professor McGarvey,
I am very pleased to inform you that you have been awarded the 2025 Franz Boas
Distinguished Achievement Award by the Human Biology Association (HBA). The Boas
Award, honors members of the Association for exemplary contributions to human biology in
science, scholarship, and other professional service. Along with other award recipients, you will
be honored at the annual meeting Awards Luncheon in Baltimore. Please refer to the conference
schedule for exact time and place.
On behalf of the HBA Executive Committee and the entire membership, hearty congratulations
on this achievement and thank for your contributions to the HBA community.
Sincerely,

Richard G. Bribiescas

Associate Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Graduate Program Director for the M.Sc. in Global Public Health Abigail Harrison will serve as a co-Investigator on new research aiming to prevent HIV among South African adolescents.

Read about the major projects and events that happened at the Institute.

Brown School of Public Health epidemiologist Mark Lurie discusses the Center for Mobility Analysis for Pandemic Prevention Strategies, or MAPPS. The goal of MAPPS is to stop a deadly disease outbreak from becoming a pandemic by accurately predicting how the outbreak left unchecked might unfold, allowing policymakers and medical and public-health officials to counter the outbreak long before it reaches crisis stage. (Paywalled article)

Fifteen teams of Brown faculty researchers have received a total of $350,000 from the University’s new COVID-19 Research Seed Fund. 

Rhode Island gives the appearance of a state where the coronavirus is a fire raging, the average number of daily infections more than quadrupling since the start of this month. The reality is more complicated and encouraging, as state health workers have tested more residents per capita in Rhode Island than in any other state, leading them to discover many infections that might have gone overlooked elsewhere.

As the novel coronavirus spreads across the world, Professor Mark Lurie of the Brown University Department of Epidemiology helps explain the term and its use in understanding the virus.

Professor Mark Lurie of the Brown University Department of Epidemiology on making sense of COVID-19 updates in a NY Times article.

Professor Mark Lurie and other experts speak to the NY Times, weighing in to explain how differences across populations and health systems create challenges for estimating the coronavirus risk: “Since most cases are mild, and testing has not been universal, almost by definition we are failing to detect and therefore count all of the cases."

Multiple Brown University IHI Professors are co-authors on the recently published study contributing to the understanding of the impact of integrated care to the health care of HIV-positive patients with comorbid hypertension.

Jennifer Pellowski, PhD, Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Omar Galárraga, PhD, Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice, have been selected for an NIH training program at The Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health (TIDIRH).

New and innovative approaches are needed to improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of HIV in low-income and middle-income countries.

Brianna Osetinsky, Mark N. Lurie, Stephen T. McGarvey, and Omar Galárraga publish their study in Health Affairs.

An article in the journal AIDS by Professor Caroline Kuo and doctoral student Ashleigh LoVette concludes that resilience-focused interventions hold promise for improving the behavioral health of adolescents living in high HIV prevalence settings.

Ashleigh LoVette, a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health, has been awarded the 2018 Mariam K. Chamberlain Dissertation Award by the International Center for Research on Women.

Faculty member Mark Lurie was recently quoted in The Washington Post.

Stephen McGarvey, Professor of Epidemiology, received $3,073,527 for "Impact of the obesity-risk CREBRF p.Arg457Gln variant on energy expenditure, intake, and substrate utilization in Samoans" from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. 

In March 2018, IHI Faculty Members Mark Lurie, Abigail Harrison, Caroline Kuo, Jennifer Pellowski and Angie Bengtson were in Malmesbury, outside of Cape Town, South Africa to convene the 5th Annual SASH Forum, a collaboration between Brown and the University of Cape Town. The aim of SASH is to train and mentor the next generation of African social scientists able to address the HIV epidemic; over fifty people attended.

Several School of Public Health faculty—including Professors Mark Lurie, Abigail Harrison, Caroline Kuo, and Don Operario—recently travelled to Cape Town, South Africa for a scholarly retreat with University of Cape Town faculty and fellows in the South African Social Science and HIV Programme (SASH).

With $1.45 million over five years from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, Omar Galarraga and other Brown University professors will work with colleagues in Ghana to build the research capacity needed to address the deadly co-epidemics of HIV and tuberculosis.

“Once people get on antiretroviral treatment, STI’s become less prevalent,” said Mark Lurie, assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University and lead author, whose research team included graduate student Kirwa Kipruto. “It’s really the period prior to that that’s especially important.”

Brown University epidemiologist Stephen McGarvey, who has been studying the Samoan pandemic for years, spoke at the AAAS annual meeting Sunday, Feb. 16, 2014, in Chicago.

With a goal to reduce HIV risk behaviors, public health economist Omar Galárraga investigated whether gay men and male sex workers in Mexico City would participate in a conditional cash transfer program that encourages HIV prevention education and regular testing. A new study in the European Journal of Health Economics reports the price that would get more than 75-percent participation: $288 a year.

The National Institutes of Health will fund a new five-year project headed by Stephen McGarvey, professor of community health and anthropology. McGarvey will lead efforts to conduct detailed genotyping of Samoan adults in order to document genetic variation and see whether it can be connected to propensities toward obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Stephen McGarvey fellow for his significant contributions to the life and physical sciences.