Co-Director


Dr. Satchit Balsari is Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.


Dr. Balsari is affiliate faculty at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability; and serves on the steering committee of the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard and the Harvard Global Health Institute

Dr. Balsari’s research and teaching are focused on complex humanitarian emergencies and digital health implementation science in resource-poor settings. He has worked with populations affected by war and disasters in Iraq, South Sudan, Jordan, Haiti, Puerto Rico and across South Asia. In the most vulnerable communities in the world, his team has leveraged cutting-edge digital tools and citizen science to advance public health planning, advocacy, and response. 

Dr. Balsari co-directs CrisisReady.io, a research-response platform that builds data-driven decision tools for local communities and response agencies affected by disasters globally. Dr. Balsari is founding director of the tri-institute Climate and Human Health fellowship at Harvard, leads the climate platform at the Mittal Institute, and is co-investigator on the Salata Institute’s inaugural interfaculty cluster grant on Climate Change Adaptation in South Asia. He directs the Harvard India Digital Health Network at the Mittal South Asia Institute. IDHN’s outputs continue to shape the technological and policy landscape of digital health in India. 

Dr. Balsari is the curator of Hum Sab Ek, an immersive multimedia traveling exhibition currently on tour. The exhibition is based on his research into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2.9 million members of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and their responses to the crisis.

Prior signature initiatives include EMcounter (a customizable, portable digital surveillance tool, the latest iteration of which was used at the world’s largest mass gathering, the Kumbh Mela in India) and Voices, a crowd-sourced, online disaster response analysis tool. In 2018, in collaboration with Professor Caroline Buckee (Epidemiology), he co-led the Hurricane Maria Mortality Study.

Dr. Balsari is a graduate of Grant Medical College, Mumbai; and completed his medical 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.


INTERESTS

  • Global Health
  • Humanitarian Crises
  • Digital Health Implementation

EDUCATION

  • MBBS, Grant Medical College
  • Emergency Medicine Residency, New York – Presbyterian Hospital
  • MPH, Population and International Health, Harvard University

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