Dr. Balsari’s research and teaching are focused on complex humanitarian emergencies and digital health implementation science in resource-poor settings. He has worked with populations affected by disaster, war, and the COVID-19 pandemic in Iraq, South Sudan, Jordan, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and across South Asia. In the most vulnerable communities in the world, his team has leveraged cutting-edge digital tools and citizen science to advance public health planning, advocacy, and response.
The Balsari Lab collaborates directly with populations in distress, humanitarian response agencies, civil society organizations, governments, and international agencies, to reduce the information asymmetry that threatens to exclude the poor and disadvantaged from decisions that will impact their lives. Dr. Balsari co-directs CrisisReady.io, a research-response platform that builds data-driven decision tools for local communities and response agencies affected by disasters globally. Dr. Balsari is founding director of the tri-institute Climate and Human Health fellowship at Harvard, leads the climate platform at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and is co-investigator on the Salata Institute’s inaugural interfaculty cluster grant on Climate Change Adaptation in South Asia.
Prior signature initiatives include 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. In 2018, in collaboration with Professor Caroline Buckee (Epidemiology), he co-led the Hurricane Maria Mortality Study.