Kathryn Falb

Kathryn Falb is an assistant professor in the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and current Leon S. Robertson Faculty Development Chair in Injury Prevention. She joined Johns Hopkins from the International Rescue Committee, an international humanitarian aid organization, where she spent nearly a decade and most recently served as research director.

Trained as a social epidemiologist, her work integrates qualitative and quantitative methods to understand and prevent violence against women, children, and other marginalized populations, primarily in humanitarian settings. Her recent work has focused on how to prevent children from engaging in armed groups. She has conducted field research across diverse contexts, including Raqqa Governorate in Syria, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and refugee camps in Ethiopia. Falb holds a doctor of science from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, a master of health science from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a bachelor of science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and she completed postdoctoral training at the Yale School of Public Health.

Falb’s project, “Creating Early Off-Ramps from the ‘Manosphere’ to Prevent Polarization and Promote Social Cohesion,” will draw on insights from humanitarian research, child development theory, and public health to explore why some young men are drawn to online polarized communities and how participation affects their mental health and relationships to others, including the women in their lives. It will also develop early, practical “off-ramps” to reduce or redirect such engagement toward healthier connections and well-being.

May 2026