Gaurab Basu, MD, MPH

Gaurab Basu, MD, MPH is a physician and co-founder of the CHA Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy (CHEEA). Dr. Basu is the Director of Education & Policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Basu has received numerous awards in medical education, including the inaugural Equity, Social Justice and Advocacy Faculty Award and the Charles McCabe Faculty Prize in Excellence at Harvard Medical School. He has been a Curtis Prout Academy Fellow at Harvard Medical School and a Harvard Macy Scholar. At Harvard Medical School, he is the director of the Climate Change and Health curricular theme, has been co-director of the social medicine course and has served on the Task Force to Address Racism. His academic work has been published in Academic Medicine, PLOS Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine, among others.

Dr. Basu has been recognized nationally for his work in climate change and health equity. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation named him a “Culture of Health Leader” in 2018. In 2021, he was named to the Grist 50 list of national climate leaders. He also received the Union of Concerned Scientists’ 2020 Science Defender Award. He has served on the Implementation Advisory Committee in the Massachusetts Governor’s Executive Office Of Energy and Environmental Affairs. He was a part of the city of Cambridge Mayor’s Climate Crisis Working Group and its Net-Zero Climate Task Force. His perspective pieces have appeared in the Boston Globe, Scientific American, the BMJ, Grist, NPR/WBUR, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others. His work has been featured by NPR's All Things Considered.

Dr. Basu was a Sommer Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he studied human rights. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Basu has served as one of the clinical leads of Cambridge Health Alliance’s COVID Community Management clinical services. Dr. Basu is trained in community organizing and has served as a coach for workshops run by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Marshall Ganz. He has previously worked for numerous global NGOs including the Gates Institute, Partners in Health, the Child in Need Institute and Last Mile Health. 

He received his bachelor of arts at Brown University, with a concentration in international relations. He received his medical degree from the Larner College of Medicine at UVM, and his masters in public health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He completed his residency training at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School.