Climate Change and Public Health

How do global and societal issues, like climate change, affect public health? What role do healthcare professionals play—and what are their responsibilities?

Join Dr. Renee N. Salas at 4 p.m. EST on Wednesday, March 24 as she discusses this topic virtually with our students and invited guests.

This virtual event is possible thanks to the Shannon Executive Scholars Program, funded through a gift from Professor Bill and Bonnie Shannon.

Dr. Salas, a practicing emergency medicine physician, focuses her career on the intersection of the climate crisis, health, and healthcare delivery. She has served as the lead author of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change U.S. Brief since 2018 and founded and leads its working group of over 70 U.S. organizations climate change and health. Dr. Salas was a co-director for the first Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Symposium and co-leads the broader initiative in partnership with The New England Journal of Medicine. She also serves on the planning committee for the National Academy of Medicine’s Climate Change and Human Health Initiative and has testified before Congress for the full House Committee on Oversight and Reform on how climate change is harming health. She engages in research on how climate change is impacting the healthcare system and developing evidence-based adaptation. She lectures and serves on committees at the nexus of climate and health nationally and internationally, advises and publishes in high impact journals, and her work and expertise are regularly featured in mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, Time, and the  Associated Press.

Dr. Salas graduated from Saint Mary’s College with a major in  Biology and minors in Chemistry and Psychology. She received her Doctor of Medicine from the innovative five-year medical school program to train physician-investigators at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and concurrently obtained a Master of  Science in Clinical Research. She completed a four-year emergency medicine residency at the birthplace of emergency medicine, the University of Cincinnati, and matriculated to a Fellowship in Wilderness Medicine at MGH. She graduated with a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with a concentration in environmental health, in 2016.