Talk Title: Health Impacts of Pandemic-era Food Assistance Policies: A Quasi-experimental Study

Dr. Rita Hamad is a social epidemiologist and the Director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research (SPHERE) Center at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research examines the health effects of social and economic policies using interdisciplinary quasi-experimental methods to generate actionable evidence to inform policymaking. She serves as an Advisory Editor for the journal Social Science & Medicine and an Associate Editor at Health Affairs Scholar. In 2020-2022, she was the James C. Puffer American Board of Family Medicine / National Academy of Medicine Fellow. She provides consultation to state and federal legislators on the design of poverty alleviation and social safety net policies. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including many in top health policy, clinical, and epidemiology journals, and her research has been featured in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Hill. Dr. Hamad received a PhD in Epidemiology from Stanford, an MD from UCSF, master’s degrees from UC Berkeley, and an AB from Harvard University. She saw patients as a family physician for 10 years in safety net clinics throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, although she is no longer a practicing doctor.