Raquel Eidelman Cohen

Raquel Eidelman Cohen (1922 – October 21, 2020) was a Peruvian-American child psychiatrist specialized in disaster management. She was a student in the first class including women to graduate from Harvard Medical School, in 1949. She went on to become an international authority on psychological and social consequences of disasters such as Hurricane Mitch in Central America, October 1998, and intervention methods for humanitarian workers, used in assisting survivors of the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and victims of the September 11 attacks.

Early life and education Raquel Eidelman Cohen, a native of Lima, was born in 1922 to Jewish Russian emigrants. Her parents emigrated to Lima in 1920 to avoid being drafted into the Russian army.

Career As a child psychiatrist, she was associate director of the laboratory of community psychiatry for Harvard's department of psychiatry, and psychiatric director at the North Suffolk Mental Health Center in Boston from 1963 to 1967. She died on October 21, 2020, in her home in Miami.