PHR Board of Directors
Felton Earls, MD
Dr. Earls is Professor of Social Medicine and Child Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Human Behavior and Development at the Harvard School of Public Health. Since 2002 he has directed the Harvard South Africa Fellows Program, becoming the program's third director in its 30 year history.
He is Principal Investigator of two research programs. One, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, is a longitudinal study on the causes and consequences of children's exposure to urban violence. The study is considered one of the largest and most important studies in the history of the social sciences. Its seminal contribution has been to demonstrate the independent effects of community efficacy on the physical health and emotional well-being of children and adolescents.
Dr. Earls' newer project, the Ecology of HIV/AIDS and Child Mental Health, is a randomized community-level trial aimed at mitigating the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the growth, development and education of young adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa. Conducted in Tanzania, the work builds on strategies and results of the Chicago study to strengthen a community's capacity to protect children in the context of a major social disruption.
Dr. Earls is a native of New Orleans, LA. He completed both his undergraduate and medical education at Howard University. His postdoctoral training included a fellowship in neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin, internship in pediatrics at New York Medical College, residency in general psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and in child psychiatry at the Hospital for Sick Children in London, and training in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Among his many honors are membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science and a Doctor of Science from Northwestern University. He is a member of the Committee on Human Rights at the National Academies of Science and serves on the editorial boards of the major journals in the fields of social science, psychiatry and child development. His most recent awards are from the Society for Research in Child Development, the American Public Health Association, the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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