On October 24th, students and alumni heard from Gaurab Basu, MD about careers in environmental justice and health equity.

Gaurab Basu, MD, MPH is a primary care physician and Director of Education and Policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE) at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School (HMS). His work focuses on the intersection of climate change, global health equity, human rights, medical education, and public policy.

Dr. Basu has developed and evaluated numerous innovative health equity curricular programs. He is the director of the HMS Climate Change and Health curricular theme, co-founded the CHA Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy, co-directed the HMS social medicine curriculum, and co-directs the Climate Health Organizing Fellowship. He serves on the education committee of the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. Dr. Basu has received the inaugural HMS Equity, Social Justice and Advocacy Faculty Award and the HMS Charles McCabe Faculty Prize in Excellence. He has been a HMS Curtis Prout Academy Fellow and a Harvard Macy Scholar.

In 2021, Dr. Basu was named to the Grist 50 list of national climate leaders. In 2018, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation named him a “Culture of Health Leader.” He serves on the Implementation Advisory Committee in the Massachusetts Governor’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. He was a part of the city of Cambridge Mayor’s Climate Crisis Working Group and its Net-Zero Climate Task Force. His work has been featured by NPR’s All Things Considered, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, the BMJ, and Grist, among others.

Dr. Basu previously worked for numerous global NGOs including the Gates Institute, Partners in Health, the Child in Need Institute and Last Mile Health. He is on the board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Weather Channel’s climate program “Pattrn,” and on the advisory council of the Environmental League of Massachusetts. He served as one of the clinical leads of Cambridge Health Alliance’s COVID Community Management clinical services during the pandemic.

He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, with a bachelor of arts in international relations. He received his medical degree from the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont. Dr. Basu was a Sommer Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he studied human rights and received his masters in public health. He completed his internal medicine residency training at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School.