N. Stuart Harris

Founding Chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital SPEAR (SPace, Ecological, Arctic, and Resource-limited) Med Division

N. Stuart Harris MD, MFA, FRCP is the founding Chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital SPEAR (SPace, Ecological, Arctic, and Resource-limited) Med Division.  He is the founding Director of the MGH Wilderness Medicine Fellowship (2008) and the MGH Space Medicine Fellowship (2021).  He is a founding member of the Space Medicine Fellowship Council.  He is responsible for the overall Space Medicine strategy for Mass General/ Mass General Brigham/ Harvard Med. He is a full-time attending physician in the MGH Emergency Department.

Wilderness Medicine is the provision of ‘resource limited medicine under austere conditions.’  His research has focused on the acute pathophysiology due to acute hypobaric hypoxia (high altitude) and on pioneering work establishing feasibility of research and clinical ultrasound imaging in austere locations (in the Everest area, Denali, and Kilimanjaro with the U.S. Army Institute for Environmental Medicine).  

He is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is faculty of the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.  

Harris’s Arctic clinical care and research spans from Cherski, Siberia to Denali’s summit, to Maniilaq Health (Kotzebue) where he helped found Siamit – a program to learn from and contribute expertise to community care in remote Native Alaskan communities. 

Through his NOLS “Medicine in the Wild” course, he has taught a generation of senior medical students the concepts and vocabulary to recognize an ecological view of health and the impact of climate change as a healthcare emergency. He serves as Chair of the NOLS Board of Trustees.