Education

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

PhD, Sociology, University of Barcelona

MPH, International Health, Harvard School of Public Health

MA, History and Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona

RD, Nutrition, Polytechnic Institute of Barcelona

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 and maternal 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). 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 sociology 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.