Dr. Balsari co-teaches several courses across Harvard University that focus on developing innovative solutions to global crises, as well as the socio-economic challenges that come with them.
He is director of the Climate and Human Health Fellowship, which is co-hosted by the BIDMC Department of Emergency Medicine, the Center for Climate, Health and Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights.
Societal Response to Disaster (Current)
Through an in-depth examination of domestic and international disasters, this course introduces clinicians, policy makers, public health practitioners, and disaster responders to the key principles of decision making in crises. Case studies have been written by course faculty and students. We study a wide range of disasters including fires, floods, cyclones, industrial explosions, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, the pandemic, as well as methods to ascertain the impact of these disasters on morbidity and mortality.
Every year, we choose from a repository of cases that include the Cocoanut Grove Fire, the Soviet Armenian Earthquake, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Maria, Cyclone Bhola, the Kumbh Mela stampede, Philadelphia Move bombings, Tianjin industrial explosion, Fukushima Triple Disasters, and the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. Students prepare an in-depth analysis, describing something new about a disaster of their choosing.This course has been continuously running for over 30 years, and is co-directed by Satchit Balsari and Jennifer Leaning.
Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Social Problems (Current)
This university-wide course trains students to employ a variety of tools across disciplines (science, arts, urban planning, public health, business) to tackle the most intractable problems in the world today. Case-based discussions, and group-based project result in students learning from the scientist’s hypothesis-driven and iterative experimentation; the artist’s imagined counterfactuals through putting oneself in others’ shoes literally and theatrically; and the planner’s top-down articulation of boundary conditions.The course is co-taught with faculty from business (co-director, Professor Tarun Khanna), the humanities (Professor Doris Sommer), computer science (Professor Krzysztof Gajos), and urban planning and design (Professor Rahul Mehrotra).
Global Health Emergencies
This course was taught in New York City by over 20 world experts, to a highly selective group of 40 resident and mid-career physicians and public health practitioners from around the world.
This 72-CME credit course was offered for several years over an intensive two-week period and included fireside chats and volunteering in underprivileged communities in New York.
Emergency Management Exercises
These week-long, city-wide disaster drills trained paramedics, police, fire personnel, hospital administrators and clinicians in the principles of disaster triage, through large scale simulations and table-top exercises. These drills were conducted in Sri Lanka during the air-raids on Colombo in 2008, in Mumbai, weeks before the terrorist attacks in the city in 2009, and elsewhere in India for several years, until they were adopted and institutionalized by the National Disaster Management Authority of India.
mHealth ToolBox
This innovative digital health design thinking course was inaugurated in South Africa and ran at the American College of Emergency Physicians’ Annual Conferences for several years until 2014.