Lisa Berkman

About

Dr. Lisa Berkman is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is an internationally recognized social epidemiologist whose work focuses extensively on social and policy influences on health outcomes. Her research orients toward understanding inequalities in health related to socioeconomic status, different racial and ethnic groups, and social networks, support, and isolation. Dr. Berkman is the principal investigator of the Health and Aging Study in Africa: A Longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community in South Africa (HAALSI), which studies the drivers and consequences of HIV and non-communicable diseases in an aging population in Agincourt, South Africa. She has been actively involved in various research projects since 1994, including the GAZEL study of French employees and the Work, Family & Health Network. Dr. Berkman has served as Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and as chair of the Department of Society, Human Development and Health at Harvard. She is also a co-editor of the influential textbook 'Social Epidemiology' and has authored over 300 publications and chapters.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Gerontology
• Computer Security
• Internal medicine
• Law
• Environmental health
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• The path to healthy ageing in China: a Peking University–Lancet Commission

  The Lancet · 2022 · 874 citations

  DOI

• Association Between Depressive Symptoms and Incident Cardiovascular Diseases

  JAMA · 2020 · 383 citations

  Importance: It is uncertain whether depressive symptoms are independently associated with subsequent risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Objective: To characterize the association between depressive symptoms and CVD incidence across the spectrum of lower mood. Design, Setting, and Participants: A pooled analysis of individual-participant data from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration (ERFC; 162 036 participants; 21 cohorts; baseline surveys, 1960-2008; latest follow-up, March 2020) and th…

  DOI

• Working from Home and Worker Well-being: New Evidence from Germany

  ILR Review · 2023 · 60 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The COVID-19 pandemic piqued interest in remote work, but research yields mixed findings on the impact of working from home on workers’ well-being and job attitudes. The authors develop a conceptual distinction between working from home that occurs during regular work hours (replacement work-from-home) and working from home that occurs outside of those hours (extension work-from-home). Using linked establishment-employee survey data from Germany, the authors find that extension work-from-home is…

  PublisherDOI

• A global analysis of adaptation to societal aging across low-, middle- and high-income countries using the Global Aging Society Index

  Nature Aging · 2024-12-27 · 33 citations

  articleOpen access

  We have previously presented a multidimensional Aging Society Index, a weighted summation of five domains central to successful adaptation to societal aging: well-being, productivity and engagement, equity, cohesion and security, as a tool to assess countries' adaptation to demographic transformation. As the index was based on data from developed countries and some of the individual metrics or weightings may not be well suited for application to low- and middle-income countries, we here present…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chronic loneliness and the risk of incident stroke in middle and late adulthood: a longitudinal cohort study of U.S. older adults

  EClinicalMedicine · 2024-06-25 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access

  Background: Loneliness has been implicated as a stroke risk factor, yet studies have examined loneliness at only one time point. The association of loneliness changes and risk of incident stroke remains understudied. Our aim was to examine the association of loneliness with incident stroke, particularly the role of loneliness chronicity. Methods: This prospective cohort study examined data from the Health and Retirement Study during 2006-2018. For analyses examining baseline loneliness only, we…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01AG011042

  NIH · $873k · 1998

• NIH Grant R01NS032324

  NIH · $4.8M · 2006

• NIH Grant R56AG054066

  NIH · $706k · 2018

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen Tollman

  Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveillance System

  220 shared

• Kathleen Kahn

  South African Medical Research Council

  183 shared

• James A. Blumenthal

  Duke University

  163 shared

• Susan M. Czajkowski

  National Cancer Institute

  158 shared

• Ryan G. Wagner

  University of the Witwatersrand

  143 shared

• Robert M. Carney

  New York University

  137 shared

• Lana L. Watkins

  Duke University

  132 shared

• Kenneth E. Freedland

  Washington University in St. Louis

  130 shared

Awards & honors

• Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Developmen…
• faculty director of the PhD program in population health sci…
• co-editor of Social Epidemiology, a textbook in the field

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Alberto Ascherioh-171
• Andrea Baccarellih-131
• Jorge E. Chavarroh-101