Joanna (Asia) Maselko
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine
Associate Director of Research, CSTH
ScD Harvard University
BS University of Alaska Anchorage
Joanna (Asia) Maselko completed a doctorate in Social Epidemiology in 2004 and a post-doctoral fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology (2004-2006) at Harvard.
Dr. Maselko’s research uses a developmental and social epidemiological approach to disentangle social, psychological, and biological influences on both religiosity and health in an effort to better understand the causal processes leading to health outcomes. She is especially interested in how gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status shape the relationship between religious engagement/spirituality and health. Dr. Maselko recently received a grant from the NIMH to work with data from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP) birth cohort to examine how religious involvement changes over the life course and how this lifetime trajectory of religiosity is associated with risk of psychopathology. The findings have so far revealed significant heterogeneity in the direction and strength of association between religious engagement and psychopathology across different disorders, lifetime patterns of religious activity, and genders. Dr. Maselko is also the PI of a study on Religious Social Capital which aims to better understand the dynamics between community and religious forms of social capital and how they may influence health related outcomes, especially in disadvantaged communities.
Another area of research focuses on the social and economic determinants of mental health, especially suicide, in South Asia. In this context, Dr. Maselko has conducted research on women’s empowerment in Bangladesh, socioeconomic disadvantage and suicide in Goa, India, and is currently conducting a study exploring the connections between negative life events, debt, spiritual coping and mental health in Karnataka, India.
