Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Arachu Castro as the Samuel Z. Stone Chair of Public Health in Latin America, established with generous gifts from the Zemurray Foundation. She will join the faculty in the Department of Global Health Systems and Development.

A medical anthropologist, Dr. Castro’s educational background spans social anthropology, history, nutrition, biostatistics, ethnology, sociology, and international health. She holds doctoral degrees from both the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales, in social anthropology and ethnology, and the University of Barcelona, in sociology.  She earned her master’s of public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. 

Dr. Castro comes to Tulane from Harvard Medical School, where she was associate professor of global health and social medicine. She also held the position of medical anthropologist in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

She has served as principal or co-principal investigator on over 30 funded projects and her research interests focus on how social inequalities are embodied as differential risk for pathologies common among the poor and how health policies may alter the course of epidemic disease and other pathologies afflicting populations living in poverty. Her work in infectious disease and women’s health in Latin America and the Caribbean has included projects in Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela.

In 2010, Dr. Castro was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on women and AIDS in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in 2005 she and Paul Farmer earned the Rudolf Virchow Award given by the Critical Anthropology for Global Health special interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology.

She has served as a consultant for the Pan American Health Organization, UNAIDS, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, UNDP, and many other programs and organizations. She is a senior advisor for Partners In Health and has led programs at the Harvard Institute for Global Health.

Dr. Castro will be the first to hold the Samuel Z. Stone Chair of Public Health in Latin America, which was established as a joint appointment between the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.  It was named for the grandson of Samuel Zemurray, the original donor whose gift in 1912 founded the Tulane School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the first such school in the United States.  Today, as the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine celebrates its centennial, the school remains both the oldest accredited school of public health as well as the oldest school of tropical medicine in the country. 

Based in the public health school and affiliated with the Stone Center, the chair will foster stronger relations between Tulane’s uptown and downtown campuses as well as between undergraduate and graduate teaching and research, while advancing a major strategic initiative – global health.  The chair will also deepen ties between Tulane and the countries of Latin America.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Castro to Tulane!

October 30, 2012