Renee N. Salas is an American medical doctor who is an attending physician in Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and the Yerby Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She was previously the Burke Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute, where she remains one of the Affiliated Faculty.
Salas leads efforts to make physicians and hospitals become more active in their response to climate change. She was senior author of the 2022 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change U.S. Brief and lead author of previous U.S. Lancet Countdown briefs in 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018. She has worked with The New England Journal of Medicine both as a co-director for the first Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Symposium, held in 2020, and as an NEJM guest editor on climate change and health.
Salas serves on the planning committee for the Climate Change and Human Health Initiative of the National Academy of Medicine, and has testified before Congress' House Committee on Oversight and Reform. In 2021 Salas was elected as a Member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) for her work on climate change, health and the health care system.
Early life and education
Salas attended Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana from which she received a B.S. in biology in 2003 with minors in chemistry and psychology. She then attended the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (CCLCM), a program within the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. Salas was one of the first group of students to be accepted by the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine in its inaugural year in 2004. She earned both an MD and a Master's of Science in Clinical Research from Case Western Reserve University. After graduating, Salas held a residency at the University of Cincinnati, the first program in the country to offer an emergency medicine training program.
Salas started a two-year wilderness medicine fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in 2013. As part of her fellowship she attended a lecture on climate change, where she first heard that climate change would be the next public health emergency. Up until that point she had never considered that climate change would impact her patients. This lecture made her reconsider her career, shifting her research focus to climate change and its impact on public health. She went on to also earn a master's degree in public health with a concentration in environmental health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2016.
In 2015 Salas was awarded a wilderness medicine fellowship and worked as a physician for the Himalayan Rescue Association in the Everest base camp. She was one of very few medical doctors in the vicinity when the 2016 Imphal earthquake struck Nepal, and worked to save the lives of the Sherpas and visiting climbers.
Research and career
In addition to practicing emergency medicine as a physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and at Harvard Medical School, Salas studies the ways in which climate change is impacting both patients and the healthcare system. She works with health professionals to improve climate education, practice, research, and advocacy, to foster resilience, preparedness and effective leadership. When asked about the impact of climate change on the medical system, Salas remarked, "A climate lens must be added to every aspect of our practice. Speaking as an emergency medicine physician, that includes everything from ambulance and triage protocols to the screening tools we use. It also impacts how we treat patients, the discharge instructions we provide, and the follow-up plans".