Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Gaurab Basu, MD, MPH is a physician and assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and assistant professor of global health & social medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). At Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, he is an assistant professor of environmental health and core faculty at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE). 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 received the inaugural HMS Equity, Social Justice, and Advocacy Faculty Award and the HMS Charles McCabe Faculty Prize in Excellence. He has been an 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 served as an advisor to 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 was on the city of Cambridge Mayor’s Climate Crisis Working Group and its Net-Zero Climate Task Force. His work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR's All Things Considered, Boston Globe, CNN, Scientific American, BMJ, and Grist, among others.

Dr. Basu previously worked for 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 and the Environmental League of Massachusetts, and is an expert advisor to the nonprofit Rewiring America. He serves on the National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Decarbonizing the U.S. Health Sector and the Boston Green Ribbon Commission’s Healthcare Working Group.

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 master’s degree in public health. He completed his internal medicine residency training at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School.