Michael J VanRooyen, MD, MPH

Michael VanRooyen, MD, MPH is the Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Harvard University. He is also the Chairman of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and a Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to his arrival at Harvard, he was Professor and Vice-Chairman of the Johns Hopkins Department of Emergency Medicine in Baltimore and the Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Refugee and Disaster Studies.

Dr. VanRooyen is the founding Director of the HHI, an interfaculty initiative at Harvard University. He has worked as an emergency physician with numerous relief organizations in over thirty countries affected by war and disaster, including Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, North Korea, Darfur-Sudan, Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has worked in the field as a relief expert with several non-governmental organizations, including CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam, Physicians for Human Rights and Samaritans Purse International Relief. He has been a policy advisor to several organizations, including the World Health Organization and UN OCHA, and a member of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Health Cluster. He has testified before Congress and at numerous UN briefings on policy issues related to Iraq, Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and served on a National Academies/GAO review of mortality in Darfur.

Domestically, Dr. VanRooyen worked with the American Red Cross to provide relief assistance at the site of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11th, 2001. He also helped to coordinate the American Red Cross public health response to Hurricane Katrina, and oversaw the development of a 400 bed surgical field hospital in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. He worked as a physician with the US Secret Service, NASA and with the US Public Health Service with the Navajo and Apache tribes in Arizona and New Mexico, respectively.

Dr. VanRooyen lectures widely in topics related to emergency medicine, humanitarian assistance and global crisis response. He teaches courses at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Public Health on humanitarian operations in war and disaster. In 2012, he founded the Humanitarian Academy at Harvard, an educational program designed to advance humanitarian professionalism. He has authored the textbook “Emergent Field Medicine” and written extensively on international emergency medicine development and humanitarian assistance. He has served on numerous academic advisory panels and boards and on the Perspectives Editorial Advisory Board of the New England Journal of Medicine. His most recent book, “The World’s Emergency Room” was released in April, 2016.