Harvard Humanitarian Initiative

Dr. Balsari is an Emergency Physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College. His interests are focused on the development of pre-hospital care, emergency medicine and community-focused disaster mitigation methods in low-income settings.

Dr. Balsari trained and worked at the Program on Humanitarian Crises  at the Harvard School of Public Health from 2001 to 2004. As a graduate of Grant Medical College, and a resident of Mumbai, he has experience working with children in the aftermath of natural and humanitarian disasters in India, including the Bhuj earthquake of 2001. He served as a consultant to the American Red Cross public health team in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Balsari founded two non-profit organizations in Mumbai, whose work is focused on health and educational initiatives among the urban poor.

Dr. Balsari's current projects include EMcounter, an online tool aimed at capturing the epidemiology of medical emergencies in rural and urban India, and project mumbaiVOICES, a web-based application that facilitates a citizen driven analysis of urban disaster response. He recently served as Jt. Organizing Secretary of the Mumbai Emergency Management Exercise (MEMEx), in which HHI was a key collaborator.

Dr. Balsari is guest editor at SouthAsiaDisasters.net, and a member of  the Managing Committee of the Times Disaster Management Center at Mumbai University. He also serves as reviewer for the Annals of Emergency Medicine.