MIT World Speakers

Eric Chivian

Eric Chivian is Founder and Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, at Harvard Medical School. In 1980, he co-founded (with Professors Bernard Lown, Herbert Abrams, and James Muller) International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, He is the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

During the past 18 years, he has worked to involve physicians in the United States and abroad in efforts to protect the environment and to increase public understanding of the potential human health consequences of global environmental change. He was senior editor and author of MIT Press' Critical Condition: Human Health and the Environment. The book, published in 1993, was the first on the subject for a general audience and has been used as a text at several medical schools, schools of public health, and universities in the United States and abroad.

In 1996, Dr. Chivian founded and became director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School—the first center at a medical school in the United States focusing on the human health dimensions of global environmental change. The Center developed and directed the Harvard Medical School course "Human Health and Global Environmental Change" and has held 20 briefings and taught an intensive annual course on the environment and health for the U.S. Congress.

Dr. Chivian is the senior editor and author, with Dr. Aaron Bernstein, of Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, published in June 2008. The book, launched at U.N. headquarters and at the Smithsonian Institution, is the most comprehensive report available on the relationship of human health to the natural world.

He graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Biomedical Sciences and a M.D. from Harvard Medical School.