Sara Bleich Named Pforzheimer Professor

A leading expert of obesity prevention policy, Sara Bleich PhD ’07 has been named a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Bleich studies the escalation of obesity and its related diseases, devoting special attention to the drivers of obesity, disparities in patterns of obesity care, and environmental strategies to reduce caloric intake. Working at the crossroads of science and public policy, she also examines the assessment, global trends, consequences, and prevention of adult and childhood obesity.

Bleich earned her BA from Columbia University and her PhD from Harvard University. She taught at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University from 2007 to 2016. Prior to joining the Johns Hopkins faculty, she worked as a research associate at the RAND Corporation and The Measurement Group. She has received numerous competitive awards from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 2015–2016, she served as a White House Fellow.

Like all tenured Radcliffe Professors, Bleich will spend two years at the Institute during her first five years at Harvard.

“The Radcliffe Professorship will provide me with an invaluable opportunity to step back and broaden my research focus,” she says. “Being surrounded by Radcliffe fellows from such a diversity of professional backgrounds will push me to think differently about issues I already know well and issues I am eager to better understand. I suspect that by the end of the experience I will have developed new colleagues at Radcliffe and across the University who will allow me to have an even more stimulating experience at Harvard.”