Gaurab Basu, MD, MPH is a primary care physician, faculty affiliate at FXB, and Director of Education and Policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). He is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His work focuses on the intersection of climate change, global health equity, human rights, medical education, and public policy. He practices internal medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance.
Dr. Basu has developed and evaluated numerous innovative health equity curricular programs. He is the faculty director of the HMS Climate Change, Environment and Health curricular theme, the faculty lead of the HSPH Climate Change and Planetary Health interdisciplinary concentration, and co-founded the CHA Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy. He serves on the Harvard University Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability Standing Committee on Climate Education. Dr. Basu 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 selected him to their Culture of Health Leadership fellowship. Dr. Basu advises the Massachusetts Governor’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) as a member of the Implementation Advisory Committee and the Climate Science Advisory Panel. He has been 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 advisory council for the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, the Environmental League of Massachusetts, and the Weather Channel’s climate program “Pattrn.” He is an expert advisor to the non profit Rewiring America. He previously was on the board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility and 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 UVM. 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.