Gregory Ciottone, MD, FACEP, FFSEM

Ciottone is president of the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine. He is also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an instructor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is the founder and director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Fellowship in Disaster Medicine, the first department of its kind at a Harvard teaching hospital, and the medical director for the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, a joint program of the HSPHS and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Additionally, Ciottone serves as a consultant to the White House Medical Unit.

Ciottone has taught educational programs on disaster medicine and emergency management in more than 30 countries around the world, and has consulted domestically for the U.S. State Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the White House Medical Unit. He has written more than 100 scholarly works, including the first and second edition of the leading textbook in the field, Ciottone’s Disaster Medicine. In 2016, Ciottone was recognized by the Physician to the President for “Outstanding Achievement In Support Of The White House Medical Unit And The President Of The United States.” Ciottone was also the 2018 recipient of the Disaster Medical Sciences Award from the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Ciottone’s clinical and field experience includes 25 years as a practicing emergency physician and more than 500 missions as a flight physician on an aeromedical helicopter service. Early in his career, he worked with the United States Agency for International Development to create and implement sustainable disaster medical education programs throughout the former Soviet Union that trained over 50,000 healthcare providers. He later helped lead an International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear accident preparedness program for Eastern Europe. He also led one of the first federal disaster medical assistance teams (DMAT Massachuestts-2) into Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001. His team was deployed to a number of other crises around the world, including the Haiti earthquake.