Marcia Caldas de Castro

Marcia Caldas de Castro (born 1964) is a Professor of Demography and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard University. She is well known for studying Malaria and other vector borne diseases, as well as the intersection between urbanization and public health. She is the first Brazilian woman to become a faculty member at Harvard.

Education and career Castro graduated from Rio de Janeiro State University in 1986 with a degree in Statistics. She then went to work at the Brazilian National Social Security Institute's processing center in Rio de Janeiro. While working there, she earned her Masters in Demography from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. In this program, she fell under the mentorship of malaria researchers Burton Singer and Diana Sawyer. In 1998, under Singer's advice, she moved to the United States and pursued a PhD in Demography at Princeton University with Singer as her advisor. She is co-chair of the Brazil Studies Program Faculty Committee and serves on the executive committee of David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. In 2010, she was a founding member of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital.

She served as a reviewer for the academic journal Demography.

Honors & awards

2018: Roger L. Nichols Award for Excellence in Teaching.