Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Dr. Mary B. Rice MD MPH is the director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE) and the Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Respiratory Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a pulmonary critical care physician and the director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Institute for Lung Health, where she is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of research for the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine.

Rice's area of investigation focuses on the influence of environmental exposures, especially air pollution and climate change, on the respiratory health of children and adults and the development of interventions to mitigate these health effects. She is the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded clinical trial of home air purification for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and she leads the environmental health research program of the American Lung Association Lung Health Cohort. She also co-leads the Center for Climate: Equitable and Accessible Research-based Testing for Health (C-EARTH), an NIH-funded P20 Center at Harvard Chan School, which aims to bring sustainable climate solutions to heat-stressed, low-income communities around the globe.

Rice chaired the American Thoracic Society's Environmental Health Policy Committee 2018-2021 and in 2024 she was elected as chair of the Environmental, Occupational and Population Health Assembly of the American Thoracic Society. In 2020, she received the Jo Rae Wright Award for Outstanding Science from the American Thoracic Society, a national award recognizing tomorrow's leaders in science. In 2024, she was appointed by the EPA administrator to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), an independent scientific committee that advises the U.S. EPA on National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).