Maria Hershey

Maria Soledad Hershey, PhD, is a Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. Previously a John and Daria Barry postdoctoral fellow with the Program and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the sociocultural and behavioral determinants of human flourishing, particularly the roles of alcohol misuse, substance use disorders, food insecurity, and virtue-based leadership. Her work integrates epidemiological methodologies with concepts of human development to understand the role of modifiable lifestyle factors on health and wellbeing outcomes. She is interested in the implementation of lifestyle medicine and psychosocial factors into public health practice. She earned her PhD in nutritional epidemiology from the Universidad de Navarra, Spain, where she studied the synergy of Mediterranean lifestyle factors for the prevention of chronic disease and premature mortality.