Hilarie Cranmer Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Global Disaster Response, Massachusetts General Hospital
As the founding director of education and humanitarian studies at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, she designed an innovative training program that culminates in a simulated disaster field experience as well as founded the global women's health fellowship housed at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She has participated in the response to major humanitarian disasters, serving in the field during the 1999 Kosovar conflict with Physicians for Human Rights, the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia with International Rescue Committee, and the 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, during which she built and ran the largest field hospital in Haiti, caring for over 5000 patients and their families with more than 700 international volunteers, recognized by the UN and the US Government as being the best field hospital post disaster in the last 25 years. She has served and led public health teams for the American Red Cross for hurricanes Katrina and Rita. She is currently serving as the first director of global disaster response at Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) Center for Global Health, and continues to practice as clinical faculty in the Department of Emergency Medicine at MGH. She served the Technical Advisor on Ebola for International Medical Corps during the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and as incident commander for her global disaster response teams deployed to the Philippines for Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, the Nepal Earthquake in 2015, Hurricane Matthew- affected Haiti in 2016 and the 2017 Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria- affected TX, PR and Dominica. This year she directed her team’s responses to Hurricane Florence-affected North Carolina and Hurricane Michael-affected Florida, Typhoon Yutu-affected Northern Mariana Islands and well as supported a team aboard the USNS Comfort in assisting those affected by the Venezuelan Migrant Crisis. She actively serves as the chair of the NGO advisory committee for the Pan American Health Organization’s Emergency Medical Team Initiative in the Americas. She was awarded the 2015 Institute for International Medicines’ Humanitarian Crises Response Award and the 2015 Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health Alumni Award of Merit, its highest honor annually bestowed. She was recently promoted to Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the third woman to do so in this newly recognized Department, and also has an appointment as Associate Professor at the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health in the Department of Global Health and Population.