Bio
Mitsuru Mukaigawara, M.D., M.P.P., is a Ph.D. candidate in Government and an A.M. candidate in Statistics at Harvard University, as well as the Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Mukaigawara examines how health shapes conflict and security. Health lies at the core of the mechanisms scholars have identified to explain conflict. By bringing health to the center of the effort to explain conflict, he develops new theories of security and conflict grounded in mechanisms that medicine reveals. Substantively, his research centers on three interconnected research programs: the political economy of health; counterinsurgency and civilian harm; and the microfoundations of foreign-policy decision-making. Methodologically, motivated by the empirical challenges these questions present, he develops new methods, including spatiotemporal causal inference, survey methods for hard-to-reach populations, and computational text analysis using machine learning and large language models.
Mukaigawara has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, such as American Journal of Political Science, New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and Nature Medicine. His work is supported by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation. His research has been recognized with the Kenneth Boulding Award from the International Studies Association and the Best Poster Award from the Society for Political Methodology. His open-source R package, geocausal, has been downloaded more than 11,000 times.
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 received an M.D. 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 M.P.P. 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, as well as a Douglas Dillon Fellow and a Merit Award Fellow at Harvard.