Lisa M. Bates

Lisa M. Bates, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Vice Chair for Education at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Her research spans social epidemiology in both U.S. and South Asian contexts, focusing on structural drivers of health inequities related to gender, race, class, and immigration status, while investigating mechanisms linking social environments to health outcomes.

• Education: BA (1992) from Duke University, ScM (1997) and ScD (2005) from Harvard School of Public Health

In the U.S., she examines socially patterned health outcomes - particularly common mental disorders - through secondary data analysis. Her South Asian research involves primary data collection in Bangladesh and Pakistan to explore intersections of poverty, women's empowerment, intimate partner violence, and mental health impacts on child development. Current work emphasizes early life developmental trajectories of children born to mothers with perinatal depression and evaluates low-dose, scalable community-based interventions to mitigate risks through interdisciplinary collaborations.