Debra Weiner

Dr. Debra Weiner is a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, charter faculty and Director of Pediatric Disaster for the Disaster Medicine Fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She has been a disaster physician for the United States National Disaster Medical System since 1995 and has deployed nationally and internationally. Dr. Weiner is also a PhD human geneticist with expertise in emergency care for children with special needs.

Dr. Weiner is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Children and Disasters, a voting member of the United States Health and Human Services Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) National Advisory Committee on Children and Disasters, and a member of the executive board of the National Pediatric Disaster Coalition. She is also a co-founder of the WADEM Pediatric SIG.

The goals of Dr. Weiner’s disaster work have been to contribute to building capacity for pediatric disaster management and resiliency through clinical excellence, research, and advocacy and to build pediatric disaster science. Dr. Weiner has developed, taught, published, and continues to expand pediatric disaster curriculum nationally and internationally, including in austere environments. Her work includes co-mentoring a BIDMC Disaster Fellowship Delphi to establish international consensus on pediatric disaster response core competencies for non-pediatric trained clinicians across disciplines and subspecialties, and co-authoring an American Academy of Pediatrics online disaster course for Global Health providers.

Dr. Weiner’s endeavors to build pediatric disaster science include serving as site PI for a multicenter US BARDA/FDA funded Discovery-PREP/Resiliency Intelligence Network (2014-2019) to develop an international network of networks to advance disaster science. She proposed and co-led a National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) hosted Pediatric Disaster Science Symposium (2022) and was on the planning committee for a NASEM Disaster Data Science Symposium (2024). She is currently a Pediatric Pandemic Network (PPN) research committee member and was a participant in the PPN Delphi to establish pediatric disaster research priorities.