Matthew Basilico

I’m a Boston native who was always puzzled about howour materially advanced society still has people living on the streets. I was very grateful to attend Harvard College, concentrating in Social Studies and completing a senior thesis advised by the late Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician-anthropologist. After college, I taught a course with Dr. Farmer, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, and Dr. Arthur Kleinman that attempted to reframe global health. Together we produced a textbook from the class, Reimagining Global Health (UCP2013). I lived in Malawi for two years focused on rural healthcare delivery, half of which was supported by a Fulbright grant. I went on to complete an MD-PhD in Economics at Harvard, with a dissertation that focused on issues of opioid misuse, homelessness, racial bias in prescribing, and major depressive disorder. I completed a year of the categorical general surgery residency at Johns Hopkins, where I saw repeated examples of how mental illness shaped the life-arc of trauma patients, leading me to transition to this program. This past year I served on faculty at Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Economics at Harvard FAS, teaching a lecture course on the Economics of Development and Global Health. I also served as core faculty at the University of Global Health Equity in Kigali, Rwanda, teaching on economic inequality, global health delivery and African history. I hope to build a clinical and academic career around the complex interplay between society and health, what Kleinman terms “social suffering.” I enjoy backpacking, Avicii, and spending time with my niece and nephew.