Chief Division of Wilderness Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

Physician Investigator (Cl) Emergency Medicine, Mass General Research Institute

Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine Harvard Medical School

Associate Physician Emergency Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

M.F.A. University of Iowa, College of Medicine 1995

MD Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine 1999

altitude; altitude sickness; brain hypoxia; cyanosis; diffuse; environmental monitoring; hypoxia; intracranial pressure; lymphoma large b-cell; mountaineering; pulmonary edema; wilderness medicine

Dr. Harris' research focuses on investigating the pathogenesis and treatment of high altitude illness and on the interactions of human and global health. In concert with leading international high altitude physiologists and physicians, he has created the International High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE) Registry. This Registry has been adopted as the global standard. He has been named Registry Master, Chair of the Registry Steering Committee, and Executive Committee Member for the International Society for Mountain Medicine. The Registry is a fundamental tool in expanding the range of genetic, epidemiologic, and pharmacologic high altitude studies in the future.

Additionally, Dr. Harris' research team has been fortunate enough to work closely with the U.S. Army's Research Institute for Environmental Medicine (Natick, MA and Pikes Peak Summit Lab) over the last decade.  Research with multiple different departments at MGH and at BWH are ongoing.  In collaboration with the Woods Hole Research Institute, his division is pursuing research in far eastern Siberia examining the interaction between human and environmental health.

Dr. Harris' work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Center for the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, MGH, and Harvard Medical School.

In collaboration with others, Dr. Harris continues to actively research pathogenic changes in acute mountain sickness and HAPE. They are getting ever closer to describing the long-suspected, but as of yet, undocumented, basic pathophysiologic finding in a universal life threat: hypoxia.