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.[1][2] She was previously the Burke Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute, where she remains one of the Affiliated Faculty.[3]
Salas leads efforts to make physicians and hospitals become more active in their response to climate change.[4][5][6]
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[7][8][9] and 2018.[10] 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.[11][3]
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.[12]
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.[13]