Magdalena Cerdá is a Co-Investigator of the National Center for Disaster Mental Health Research. She received her DrPH in Social Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and an MPH in International Health from Yale University. She completed a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. Dr. Cerdá is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and an Epidemiologist at the New York Academy of Medicine.
Dr. Cerda's interests include the social epidemiology of risk behaviors and psychiatric disorders, particularly violence, substance abuse and depression, and the influence of massive disasters on risk behavior trajectories. Her current work looks at individual, family, peer and neighborhood influences on psychiatric comorbidity, and focuses on developing innovative methods to simultaneously measure the onset and acceleration of risk for multiple risk behaviors or psychiatric disorders. Dr. Cerdá is also using natural experiments and innovative methods of causal inference to understand the role that neighborhoods play on mental health and risk behaviors in the United States and Latin America.
Her disaster studies have focused on the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, the social, economic and mental health consequences of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Gulf Coast area, and the impact of the political conflict in Colombia on neighborhood processes and interpersonal violence in Medellín, Colombia.
Before obtaining her doctorate, Dr. Cerdá worked at the World Health Organization, where she advised countries such as Mozambique on the development of national policies on violence prevention, developed global guidelines for collecting forensic evidence in sexual violence cases, and co-authored the youth violence chapter of the World Report on Violence and Health.