Shahar Livne was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue her research at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her project examines how climate-induced migration in the Malawi-Mozambique borderlands interacts with nationalist health security policies. By analyzing cholera transmission and care pathways in borderland areas, she aims to explore cross-border mechanisms that shift away from state-centric models to support both traditional coping mechanisms and regional cholera elimination goals.

Shahar is a PhD candidate at the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her doctoral research, supervised by Professors Anat Rosenthal and Nadav Davidovitch, examines the nexus between climatic disasters, health, and food insecurity, focusing on rural healthcare services in Malawi. Shahar is also a YSSP fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, where she studies the continuity of care amid multi-hazards in the Malawian health system.

Her recent publications: 

Livne S, Mwendera M, Chibvunde S, et al. The convergence of health system, climate, and social 

pathways in Malawi’s 2022-2024 cholera outbreak - A qualitative assessment. PLoS Negl Trop Dis (in press). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0014529

Livne S, Chibvunde S, Mwendera M, et al. The fundamental causes of disaster vulnerability: Subsistence agricultural land loss in rural Malawi. Int J Disaster Risk Reduct 2026;132:105943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2025.105943.

Livne S, Feldblum I, Kivity S, et al. Kidnapping-induced trauma and secondary stress in armed conflicts: A comparative study among women in hostage families, volunteers, and the general population. Isr J Health Policy Res 2024;13:64. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13584-024-00650-8.