page_title: Cristina Possas
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Cristina Possas / Career
caption_attribution_description: Português: Palácio de Manguinhos ou Prédio da Fundação Oswaldo Cruz na Av. Brasil, nº 4365 This is a photo of a monument in Brazil identified by the ID 1037
context_page_description: Cristina Possas de Albuquerque is a Brazilian public health scientist working with infectious diseases and emerging infectious diseases from an eco-social perspective. However, her approach to social ecosystem complexity is quite different from the four-fold eco-social approach of Harvard's Nancy Krieger in that she has proposed in a 2001 English-language article in the Brazilian Journal of Public Health Reports the concept of "social ecosystem health" where ecosystems are increasingly changed by social human activity, favoring the emergence of diseases, so the term "social" should precede the prefix "eco". Thus, she is known for developing her new conceptual approach to social epidemiology, incorporating the economic concept of structural heterogeneity into an epidemiological model to identify the epidemiological profiles of heterogeneous populations in different social and economic strata and the conditions for emergence of diseases; contributions of health policy and health reform in Brazil; and research on health transition, ecological change, complex systems, and emergence of new diseases.
context_section_description: As a Brazilian Brazilian public health scientist working with infectious diseases from an eco-social perspective, Cristina Possas de Albuquerque (Cristina Possas) has as a policymaker long worked closely with public health and environmental scientists and with human rights and social justice civil organizations.
  She also is a full professor at FIOCRUZ in Brazil, where in 1998 she had earned a PhD in public health, and where she now does research on infectious diseases and teaches a course named "Scientific Methodology" in the Masters and Doctoral Programs.
  She has been also a Professor of Health Policy at the National School of Public Health at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil.  She was nominated in 1987 by the Brazilian Ministry of Health/Fiocruz to be the National Technical Coordinator of seven Groups supporting the Health Reform in Brazil, whose contributions were later incorporated into the new Brazilian 1988 Constitution.
  For a decade, she also has been a Takemi Fellow at Harvard University, a Visiting Scientist and Fulbright Fellow, and a member of the Harvard New Diseases Group, coordinated by the late Richard Levins and by Tamara Awerbuch-Friedlander, collaborating with them and other outstanding members of the group in the organizing committee of the Woods Hole Conference on New Diseases, with articles with the group later published in a special supplement of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences on this conference and in other journals. She had held for 10 years a national position as the Head of the Research and Development Unit of the Brazilian National AIDS Program.
  She has worked for more than five decades in several national and international positions with the scientific community and civil society organizations.  For ten years, she had been National Director of the Research and Technological Development Unit at the Brazilian AIDS Program in the Brazilian Ministry of Health, which has been recognized globally as an outstanding public health initiative with innovative approaches to the pandemics, always centering on free and universal access to prevention and treatment.  She was invited by the Director of the National AIDS Program to conceive and create a new and innovative Research and Technological Development Unit in the Program's structure.
  She has given interviews on AIDS, dengue, and zika.
caption: Façade of the Neo-Mouresque Palace of Manguinhos, seat of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz in Rio de Janeiro.
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