Lisa Patel, MD, Me Sc
About Lisa Patel, MD, Me Sc
25 years ago, I started on a path of bringing together my interests in the environment with health. I studied ecology and evolution in college, worked as an environmental scientist for several years before going to medical school. It was while I was in Mumbai working on an asthma collaboration between Mumbai public health officials and the Environmental Protection Agency that I had a light bulb moment. I was visiting a gymnasium that had been converted to the children’s asthma ward because the hospital didn’t have enough beds. Seeing the enormity of our failure to transition off fossil fuels in the form of a gymnasium packed with children struggling to breathe—it really hit home that this was our collective failing, and we were making children suffer for it. Since then, I've devoted my career to finding opportunities to work at the nexus of climate change and health. Today, I work both as a pediatric hospitalist, caring for premature infants in our NICU, well newborns, and hospitalized children and as the Deputy Executive Director for the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health. In my ED role, I have the privilege of organizing a movement of passionate health professional advocates throughout the country who understand climate change to be a profound threat to health and health equity. Together, we're advocating for bold policy solutions that best protect the health of our people and the planet on local, state, and federal levels.