Laura Kubzansky, PhD, MPH, is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. She has published extensively on the role of psychological and social factors in health, with a particular focus on the effects of stress and emotion on heart disease.
She is widely recognized for her work demonstrating that emotions play an important role in the development of a number of disease outcomes including cardiovascular disease, lung function decline, and cancer. Kubzansky also conducts research on whether stress, emotion, and other psychological factors may help to explain the relationship between social status and health. Other research projects and interests include the biological mechanisms linking emotions, social relationships, and health; relationships between early childhood environments, resilience, and healthy aging; how interactions between stress and environmental exposures (e.g., lead and air pollution) may influence health; and pathways by which education and cognitive performance may influence adult mental and physical health outcomes over the life course.
Kubzansky served as a member of the external advisory board for the Harvard Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research and as a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Behavioral Medicine. She is project investigator or co-investigator on a wide variety of grants funded through the Veterans Administration, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, and others.
Kubzansky received her PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in social epidemiology as well as a master’s in public health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
