Posted on December 2, 2022
Learn about Dr. Renee Salas, NEHI's 2023 Innovator in Health awardee.
Renee Salas, MD, MS, MPH
Emergency Medicine Physician, Massachusetts General Hospital
Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Renee N. Salas is a well-recognized expert on climate change and its implications for health and health care delivery. She served as the lead author of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change U.S. Brief between 2018 to 2021, moving to senior author in 2022, and founded and leads its Working Group of nearly 80 U.S. organizations. She was a Co-Director for the first Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Symposium - in partnership with The New England Journal of Medicine - and spearheads the broader Initiative. Dr. Salas is also a guest editor for The New England Journal of MedicineGroup’s series entitled “Fossil-fuel Pollution and Climate Change.”
Dr. Salas was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in 2021 for her work on climate change and health. She served on NAM’s original planning committee for the Grand Challenge on Health and Climate Change and continues to serve on their committees. She frequently speaks at high-level engagements across diverse sectors, such as the White House Health Equity Forum, and has testified before Congress for the full House Committee on Oversight and Reform. She engages in research on how climate change is impacting the healthcare system. She lectures and serves on committees at the nexus of climate and health nationally and internationally, advises and publishes in high impact journals, and received numerous awards and recognition for her work. Her expertise and work are regularly featured in mainstream media outlets like the Associated Press, New York Times, NPR, and USA Today.
Dr. Salas is a practicing emergency medicine physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She holds a variety of appointments around Harvard University, including as Affiliated Faculty and previous Burke Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI), Co-Director of the ClimateMD program and a previous Yerby Fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Read Dr. Salas work: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneensalas-md-mph-ms/details/publications/
