Education

PhD, Ethnology and Social Anthropology, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1996

PhD, Social Sciences and Health, School of Economics, University of Barcelona, 1997

MPH, International Health, Harvard School of Public Health, 1998

MA, History and Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, 1988

RD, Nutrition, Polytechnic Institute of Barcelona, 1988

Biography

Arachu Castro, Ph.D., M.P.H., is Samuel Z. Stone Chair of Public Health in Latin America and Director of the Collaborative Group for Health Equity in Latin America at Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Her major interests are 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. Dr. Castro works at the intersection of medical anthropology and epidemiology and has a focus on reproductive health, maternal and child health, and infectious disease from a health equity perspective. She is the lead author of the UNICEF-Tulane publication Health Equity Report 2016: Analysis of Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child, and Adolescent Health Inequities in Latin America and the Caribbean to Inform Policy Making. Dr. Castro has worked in Mexico, Argentina, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Bolivia. Prior to joining Tulane in 2013, she was Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Among other awards, Dr. Castro is the recipient of the 2005 Rudolf Virchow Award and the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2012 she was named Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology and in 2017 she became President of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. She has worked as consultant for PAHO, WHO, UNICEF, UNAIDS, UNDP, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank, and is in the Board of Directors of Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC). Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, the Maternal Health Task Force, UNICEF, the Pan American Health Organization, UNAIDS, Tulane University, and Harvard University, among others. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology and ethnology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1996), a Ph.D. in social sciences and health from the University of Barcelona (1997), and a MPH from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston (1998).

Publications

Please view Dr. Castro's publications NCBI Profile page.

Publications on mistreatment of women during childbirth:

Obstetric Violence as Reproductive Governance in the Dominican Republic. Castro A, Savage V. Medical anthropology. 2018; :1-14. PubMed [journal] PMID: 30433822

Measuring mistreatment of women during childbirth: a review of terminology and methodological approaches. Savage V, Castro A. Reproductive health. 2017; 14(1):138. PubMed [journal] PMID: 29073914 PMCID: PMC5658997

Assessing equitable care for Indigenous and Afrodescendant women in Latin America. Castro A, Savage V, Kaufman H. Revista panamericana de salud publica = Pan American journal of public health. 2015; 38(2):96-109. PubMed [journal] PMID: 26581050

Preprint from the 1000 Days in the Dominican Republic (1000 DRD) Project:

Validation of the Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool for Children in the Dominican Republic. Sanchez-Vincitore LV, Schaettle P, Castro A. bioRxiv 497347; 2018; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/497347.