Dr. Arachu Castro, Ph.D., MPH, is Samuel Z. Stone chair of Public Health in Latin America and director of the Collaborative Group for Health Equity in Latin America at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, in New Orleans. She is a medical anthropologist trained in public health.

Before joining Tulane in 2013, she was associate professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Among other awards, Castro is the recipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship for her research on the management of HIV and syphilis during pregnancy in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Currently, she researches the differential impact of obstetric violence on maternal and child health outcomes and the indirect effects of the management of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to health services for women, children, and adolescents. She has testified in the United States Congress Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere and the United States Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere on COVID-19 vaccine access in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Castro is former president of the Society for Medical Anthropology, member of WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group of Experts for Maternal, Newborn, Child, Adolescent Health & Nutrition, the Executive Committees of the Health Equity Network of the Americas and the Sustainable Health Equity Movement, and of IPPF’s International Medical Advisory Panel. She has published widely.

Role at the Dialogue: Event Speaker