Dr. Satchit Balsari is Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 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 disaster, war and the COVID-19 pandemic 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.
The Balsari Lab collaborates directly with populations in distress, humanitarian response agencies, civil society organizations, governments, and international agencies, to reduce the information asymmetry that threatens to exclude the poor and disadvantaged from decisions that will impact their lives. 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.
Dr. Balsari is currently curating a traveling exhibition Hum Sab Ek, on the impact of the pandemic on the lives and livelihoods of the working poor in India, and the tools of organization and collective bargaining used by them to navigate the greatest public health emergency of our times.
He is affiliate faculty at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS, the Center for International Development at the Kennedy School, the Harvard University Center for the Environment, the Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights.
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.
In March 2017, Pranab Mukherjee, President of India, awarded him India’s highest honor in medicine, the Dr B.C. Roy National Award for “outstanding services in the field of sociomedical relief.” Dr. Balsari has also been an Aspen Ideas Scholar (2016) and an Asia 21 Fellow of the Asia Society. Dr. Balsari received his medical degree from Grant Medical College in Mumbai, India and his public health degree from Harvard; he completed his emergency medicine residency at Columbia and Cornell’s New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he was chief of the global emergency medicine division, until 2017.
