BIO
Mitsuru Mukaigawara, MD, MPP, is a physician-political scientist. He is currently a PhD candidate in Government and an AM candidate in Statistics at Harvard University. Mukaigawara studies international relations, political methodology, and political psychology, with a focus on the effects of disease epidemics and health inequities on intrastate and interstate warfare and the effective use of micro-level, spatiotemporal data in causal inference. He is a Douglas Dillon Fellow and a Merit Award Fellow (2025) at Harvard. His work is supported by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Harvard Data Science Initiative.
Prior to graduate school, Mukaigawara worked globally both as an infectious disease physician and a policy analyst in settings ranging from a remote island in southern Japan to the World Health Organization headquarters. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, such as the American Journal of Political Science, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and Nature Medicine.
He received an MD from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (Institute of Science Tokyo), trained at the Okinawa Chubu Hospital Internal Medicine Residency and Infectious Disease Fellowship, and received an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Belfer Young Leader / Graham T. Allison, Jr. Student Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a recipient of the Robert Belfer Annual Award for the best master’s thesis in international relations. Previously, he was a Hans J. Morgenthau fellow at the University of Notre Dame (2024-25).