Mitsuru Mukaigawara

Mitsuru Mukaigawara is a physician–political scientist. He is a PhD candidate in government and AM candidate in statistics at Harvard University. Having worked as an infectious disease physician in resource-limited settings, Mukaigawara bridges medicine, political science, and statistics to develop a new interdisciplinary field of health and politics.

At Radcliffe, Mukaigawara is working on a book that advances a new theory of how disease epidemics reshape armed conflict. The project introduces the concept of frontier plagues—severe epidemics that erupt in fragile regions—and develops a theoretical framework for understanding how these crises transform the strategic landscape of political violence. Drawing on original microlevel data from conflict-affected settings, the book integrates spatiotemporal causal inference with qualitative evidence to trace how epidemics restructure the logic of armed conflict.

Mukaigawara received an MD from Institute of Science Tokyo (formerly Tokyo Medical and Dental University)and an MPP from Harvard Kennedy School, where he received the Robert Belfer Annual Award for Best PAE in IGA. He trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Chubu Tokushukai Hospital. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, JAMA, The Lancet, Nature Medicine, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among others. He was a Merit Award Fellow at Harvard and a O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow.