Satchit Balsari

Dr. Satchit Balsari is Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and in Global Health and Population at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Balsari studies the impact of public health emergencies, disasters and war on the most vulnerable. The Balsari Lab collaborates closely with populations in distress, humanitarian organizations, governments, and international agencies to bridge information gaps that often exclude the marginalized from decisions that affect their health and livelihoods in the aftermath of disasters. The lab has pioneered digital tools that have advanced data-driven decision-making in public health crises in the US and overseas, including Climateverse, a curated data-repository for key climate-related datasets in India and Columbia.

Dr. Balsari co-directs CrisisReady, a global research-response platform at Harvard that builds decision-tools to help health care systems anticipate and respond in real-time to populations displaced by extreme weather events. Dr. Balsari teaches courses across the university on disasters, climate change and multi-dimensional problem solving. He directs Harvard’s Climate and Human Health Fellowship and the Climate Platform at the Mittal South Asia Institute; and leads several interfaculty, interdisciplinary projects, hosted at Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability and the Mittal South Asia Institute.

He is currently curator of the Hum Sab Ek, which is a mixed-media exhibition examining how a group of trade unions and cooperatives comprising three million poor women working in India’s informal economy successfully navigated the pandemic and a co-lead of the Community HATS project, which is the largest longitudinal assessment to date (globally) of the microenvironmental exposures and adaptations in the lived experiences of the working poor. Dr. Balsari is an Asia Society Fellow, an Aspen Ideas Scholar and recipient of the BC Roy Award, India’s highest honor in medicine. Balsari received his medical and public health training from Bombay University, Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard.