Laura Kubzansky, Ph.D.

Dr. Laura Kubzansky is Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and co-director of the JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She also served as a founding-director of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness. She has published extensively on the role of psychological and social factors in health, with a focus on stress and positive psychological assets in relation to cardiovascular disease. She also conducts research on whether stress, emotion, and other psychological factors are pathways underlying social disparities in health. Other research projects and interests include: (a) biological mechanisms linking emotions, social relationships, and health; (b) relationships among early childhood environments, resilience, and healthy aging; (c) how psychosocial stress or assets interact with toxic environmental exposures (e.g., air pollution) to influence health; (d) the role of work conditions in fostering worker well-being and identifying workplace policies and practices that enable workers to be healthy. Dr. Kubzansky has worked with numerous graduate students and postdoctoral research fellows as a mentor, academic advisor, and dissertation committee member. She is a fellow in the American Psychological Association and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. Dr. Kubzansky has served as an expert advisor to numerous panels at foundations, health agencies, and the government, as an advisor for multiple centers and training programs, and is a principal or co-investigator on a wide variety of grants funded through the Veteran’s Administration, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, and National Institutes of Health, among others.