Gaurab Basu, M.D.

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 faculty at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE) and the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. His work focuses on the intersection of climate change, global health equity, human rights, medical education, and public policy. 

Dr. Basu currently serves as senior advisor of the climate and health program at the Child in Need Institute (CINI), an India based NGO. He is involved in numerous projects focused on addressing the health impacts of climate change on impoverished communities in the Indian Sundarbans and in the city of Kolkata. He is also a co-PI of a Wellcome Trust funded project that studies the health benefits of climate mitigation policies in India at the national and city level. His NIH funded projects focus on community engagement and research translation in climate and health research.

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. He previously co-founded the Center for Health Equity Education & Advocacy at Cambridge Health Alliance.

In 2018, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation selected Dr. Basu to their Culture of Health Leadership fellowship. In 2021, he was named to the Grist 50 list of national climate leaders. Dr. Basu has served as an advisor to the Massachusetts Governor’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs 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. He is on the board of directors of the Environmental League of Massachusetts and the advisory council for the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health and the Kresge Foundation’s Climate Change, Health, and Equity Initiative. He also serves on the National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Decarbonizing the U.S. Health Sector. He has spoken at prominent forums such as the New York Times’s Climate Week NYC panel, the Atlantic’s Health Summit, and the Aspen Ideas Climate Festival. His work has been featured in NPR's All Things Considered, the Boston Globe, CNN, Scientific American, BMJ, and Grist, among others. He previously worked for the Gates Institute, Partners in Health, and Last Mile Health.

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.