Margareta (Magda) Matache, PhD, MPA, is a Lecturer on Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the co-founder and Director of the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University. She is also a member of the Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health.
Matache’s research and teaching focus on the manifestations and impacts of racism and other systems of oppression in different geographical and political contexts. Her research examines structural and social determinants of health, and their nexus with the historical past and contemporary public policies, with a particular focus on anti-Roma racism.
In 2017, she co-edited Realizing Roma Rights, an investigation of anti-Roma racism in Europe, in collaboration with Jacqueline Bhabha, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard Chan School, and Andrzej Mirga, former Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)/Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) Senior Adviser on Roma and Sinti Issues and chief of the ODIHR Contact Point for Roma and Sinti Issues.
Matache is also the co-editor of Time for Reparations, a 2021 volume exploring the issue of reparations across a broad range of historical and geographic contexts and academic disciplines, along with Jacqueline Bhabha and Caroline Elkins, Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Magda is the author of the upcoming book The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism: (Un)uttered Sentences (Routledge, 2025), which places anti-Roma racism in historical, regional, and global scholarship, examining its specific and universal underpinnings and manifestations and its interconnectedness to other oppressions.
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With over 25 years of experience in organizational leadership, policy advocacy, social change interventions, and academic work, Magda has dedicated her career to framing and addressing anti-Roma racism and other systems of oppression. To that end, she was engaged in creating Roma-related content with noted animator, author, and illustrator Glen Keane, as well as award-winning documentary filmmaker Mona Nicoară.
Matache earned a BA in social work, an MA in European social policies, and a PhD in political science, all from the University of Bucharest, Romania, and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School. From 2005 to 2012, Magda was the Executive Director of Romani CRISS, a human rights organization that defends the rights of Roma people. In 2012, she was awarded the Hauser postdoctoral research fellowship at the Harvard Chan School’s François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and became an instructor at the Harvard Chan School in 2014.