Director of the Program on Social Policy and Behavioral Health, MGH Center for Global Health and Mongan Institute
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Alexander Tsai is a board-certified psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is Director of the Program on Social Policy and Behavioral Health, a joint collaboration between the Center for Global Health and the Mongan Institute. He is also an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a faculty affiliate with the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and an Honorary Lecturer at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Mbarara, Uganda. His research focuses on understanding how large-scale social pathogens such as stigma and discrimination affect the distribution of mental health outcomes among marginalized populations in different settings, including people with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa and racialized minorities in the U.S. A secondary focus of his research has been to discern how social policy can be used to address social determinants and shift the distribution of mental health outcomes so as to protect the most vulnerable. He advances research in these areas through his own scholarship as well as in his roles as a Specialty Consulting Editor for PLOS Medicine, Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief for Social Science and Medicine-Mental Health, and Founding Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Global Health Psychiatry. Prior to his appointment at Mass General, he completed a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and his residency training in general adult psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco.