Center for
Global Health

Scholar

Languages: English, Haitian Creole(proficient)

BIO STATEMENT

Aaron Richterman, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and an infectious diseases physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. His research sits at the intersection of behavioral economics, causal inference, and health policy, examining how poverty and food insecurity shape health outcomes, particularly those related to HIV and tuberculosis, and how social protection programs and economic interventions can improve them. He holds affiliations with the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, and the Population Aging Research Center, and serves as Director of the Clinical Core of the Penn Center for AIDS Research.

Global health has anchored Dr. Richterman's career from the start. He attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania before completing the Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity and Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where his clinical and research work focused on HIV, tuberculosis, and cholera in rural Haiti. From there he pursued a global health research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, earned an MPH at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and returned to Penn for his infectious diseases fellowship. He is proficient in Haitian Creole and has maintained longstanding research partnerships in Haiti for nearly a decade.

Dr. Richterman's work centers on the relationship between poverty, food insecurity, and infectious disease outcomes at both the individual and population level, and on how social safety net programs can be leveraged to improve them. His current global health portfolio reflects this focus through rigorous evaluation of poverty-reduction interventions. He leads an NIMH-funded trial of unconditional cash transfers for pregnant women with HIV in Botswana. Using quasi-experimental methods, he has evaluated the effects of government cash transfer programs across dozens of low- and middle-income countries, with findings published in Nature, The Lancet, and Nature Human Behaviour, and was invited by the World Bank to evaluate Egypt's largest cash transfer program. Other ongoing work includes an evaluation of asymptomatic TB disease identified through an active case-finding program in Vietnam.

Recent Global Health Projects

1. Unconditional cash transfers for pregnant women with HIV (Botswana and Haiti). I lead an NIMH-funded randomized trial in Botswana testing whether unconditional cash transfers for pregnant women with HIV improve medication adherence and other health behaviors by relieving poverty-related cognitive burdens ("mental bandwidth"). In parallel work in rural Haiti, my collaborators and I co-designed a cash transfer intervention for pregnant women with HIV through structured engagement with prospective recipients, eliciting their priorities and constraints before finalizing the intervention (AIDS and Behavior, 2026).

2. Population-level effects of cash transfer programs in low- and middle-income countries. Using difference-in-differences designs linking harmonized policy data to nationally representative microdata across dozens of countries, I have shown that large-scale government cash transfer programs reduced adult and child mortality (Nature, 2023), improved HIV prevention and care outcomes (Nature Human Behaviour, 2022), and shifted a broad range of behavioral and health determinants of mortality (The Lancet, 2025). I was also invited by the World Bank to apply synthetic difference-in-differences methods to Egypt's largest cash transfer program, finding a ~17% reduction in under-5 mortality.

Select Publications

Richterman A, Bùi TN, Bair EF, Jerome G, Millien C, Suffrin JCD, Behrman JR, Thirumurthy H. The effects of government-led cash transfer programmes on behavioural and health determinants of mortality: a difference-in-differences study. Lancet. 2025 Dec 6;406(10520):2656-2666. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12626383/

Richterman A, Desire S, Blaise W, Derose E, Moise A, Ward LP, Millien C, Thirumurthy H, Momplaisir F, Ivers LC. Money, Medicine, and Motherhood: Developing a Cash Transfer for Pregnant Women with HIV in Rural Haiti. AIDS Behav. 2026 Apr;30(4):962-968. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13076426/

Richterman A, Saintilien E, St-Cyr M, Claudia Gracia L, Sauer S, Pierre I, Compere M, Elnaiem A, Dumerjuste D, Ivers LC. Food Insecurity at Tuberculosis Treatment Initiation Is Associated With Clinical Outcomes in Rural Haiti: A Prospective Cohort Study. Clin Infect Dis. 2024 Aug 16;79(2):534-541. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38888419/

Richterman A, Millien C, Bair EF, Jerome G, Suffrin JCD, Behrman JR, Thirumurthy H. The effects of cash transfers on adult and child mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Nature. 2023 Jun;618(7965):575-582. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10231298/

Richterman A, Thirumurthy H. The effects of cash transfer programmes on HIV-related outcomes in 42 countries from 1996 to 2019. Nat Hum Behav. 2022 Jul 18;. doi: 10.1038/s41562-022-01414-7. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 35851840.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01414-7

Richterman A, Bosire R, Marcus N, Bair EF, Agot K, Thirumurthy H. Trends in Transactional Sex Among Women at Risk for HIV in Rural Kenya During the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA Netw Open. 2022 Jul 1;5(7):e2220981. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.20981. PubMed PMID: 35788674; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC9257559. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35788674/

Last Updated: 28 July 2026