Satchit Balsari

Dr Satchit Balsari is a research fellow at Harvard FXB, where his research has contributed to advocacy on behalf vulnerable populations affected by disasters and humanitarian crises, including children in Haiti, refugees in Jordan, and the Rohingya in Bangladesh. Until recently, he served as Director of the Global Emergency Medicine Program at Weill Cornell Medical College/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital; in the summer of 2017, Dr Balsari will join the faculty of emergency medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is currently part of Professor Jennifer Leaning’s team assessing the impact of the Syrian war on medicine and public health in the region.
His interdisciplinary interests in mobile technology, disaster response and population health have been informed by his clinical practice in New York City and his field work around the world including, more recently, in Jordan, Iraq, South Sudan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. His research has resulted in innovative applications of mobile, cloud-based technology to address public health challenges in mass gatherings, disasters, and humanitarian crises. Balsari’s signature initiatives include project EMcounter (a customizable, portable digital surveillance tool, the latest iteration of which was used at the world’s largest mass gathering, the Kumbh Mela in India) and Voices, a crowd-sourced, online disaster response analysis tool.
At Harvard, Dr. Balsari co-teaches a university-wide course “Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Social and Economic Problems,” led by Professor Tarun Khanna, director of Harvard’s South Asia Institute (SAI); and “Societal Response to Disaster and War,” with Professor Leaning at the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Balsari recently published two co-authored reports, Exchanging Health Information and Task Shifting in Healthcare: Reframing the Ayush Debate. Both published by the South Asia Institute and focused on India, they form part of an approach to advancing healthcare equity in India through technology, task shifting, and training (3T).
In March 2017, Pranab Mukherjee, President of India, awarded him the prestigious 2016 Dr B.C. Roy National Award for outstanding services in the field of sociomedical relief.