We study public health emergencies. Our interdisciplinary teams are informed by decades of clinical practice, medical and public health research, and field work in disasters and wars around the world.
We work closely with populations in distress, governments, and humanitarian response agencies.
Our technical innovations and policy briefs have advanced clinical and public health among populations in South Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.
Team
Dr. Satchit Balsari is an emergency physician and public health practitioner. Over the past 20 years, his research has sought to advance the health and human rights of populations displaced by disasters and war, across the Middle East, South Asia and the Americas. He is assistant professor at Harvard’s medical and public health schools, and teaches courses across the University on disasters, war, and leveraging entrepreneurship to solve intractable socioeconomic problems.
Dr. Balsari is the co-director of CrisisReady, a research-response platform committed to advancing evidence-based decision making in disasters (crisisready.io). Dr. Balsari’s innovations in digital health implementation science include cloud-based disease surveillance systems deployed at some of the world’s largest gatherings, including the 2013 and 2015 Kumbh Melas in India. He directs the Harvard India Digital Health Network at the Mittal South Asia Institute (idhnet.org). IDHN’s policy outputs have helped shape the technological and policy landscape of digital health in India. He is founding director of the Climate and Human Health Fellowship at Harvard (climateandhumanhealth.org)
He is a graduate of Grant Medical College, Mumbai; and completed his training at Harvard, Cornell and Columbia. Dr. Balsari is an Asia Society Fellow, an Aspen Ideas Scholar, and the youngest recipient of the BC Roy Award awarded by the President of India, the nation’s highest honor in medicine.
Research Team (Harvard)
- Isaac Chan, Research Assistant, Community Science Alliance Project
- Kimberly Humphrey, Fellow, Climate and Human Health Fellow
- Neha Joseph, Research Fellow, Climate Change Adaptation Project
- Ravi Sadhu, Research Assistant, SEWA Impact Ascertainment; Rohingya Impact Ascertainment
- Tess Wiskel, Fellow, Climate and Human Health Fellow
Research Team (External)
- Abhishek Bhatia, Doctoral Student, UNC Chapel Hill; Syria Ascertainment Study; Kerala Monsoon Impact Ascertainment
- Carolyn John, Research Associate; Community Science Alliance
- Bharat Kalidindi, Researcher, NCD Optimization Study; St John’s Research Institute
- Rida Sadaqat, Research Associate; Community Science Alliance
- Anuja Sankhe, Research Associate; Community Science Alliance
- Ahmed Sheikh, Critical Care Fellow, Mount Sinai Health System, New York, USA
- Verghese Thomas, St John’s Research Institute; NCD Optimization Study
- Jay Vidya, Researcher, Skywalk Labs; Climate Change Adaptation Project
- Abhijeet Waghmare, Researcher, NCD Optimization Study; St John’s Research Institute
Collaborators (Harvard)
- Caroline Buckee, Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard Chan; Associate Director, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics
- Caleb Dresser, Instructor, Harvard Medical School
- Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School; Director, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University
- Jennifer Leaning, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Chan; (Former director, Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights)
- Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning; Chair, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design
- Dan Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering; Director, Harvard University Center for Environment
External Collaborators (Current)
- Shitij Arora, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, Albert Einstein School of Medicine, USA
- Rajani Bhat, Pulmonary Critical Care Specialist, Bangalore, India
- Mihir Bhatt, Director, All India Disaster Mitigation Institute, India
- Matt Kiang, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford
- Jay Lemery, Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado, USA
- Charuta Mandke, Associate Professor of Ophthalmology, Cooper Hospital, Mumbai
- Manoj Mohanan, Associate Professor of Economics, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, USA
- Tony Raj, Professor of Physiology, Dean, St. John’s Medical Research Institute, India
- Andrew Schroeder, Vice President of Research, Direct Relief, USA; co-director, CrisisReady.io
- Amita Sudhir, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Virgina, USA
External Collaborators (Prior)
- Josyann Abisaab, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine
- Emily Chan, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean (External Affairs) at the Faculty of Medicine of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
- Kevin Huang, Assistant Professor in Emergency Medicine, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Deputy Director, Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response (CCOUC)
- Rex Lam, Clinical Associate Professor of emergency medicine and the Chair of Speciality of 24-hour Outpatient and Emergency Department of Gleneagles Hong Kong Hospital
- Elizabeth Newman, Senior Lecturer, Curtin University School of Population Health; Program Lead for the enAble Institute
- Irdudaya Rajan, (former-Director), Center for Development Studies, Kerala, India
