Gregory Ciottone

President of the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine

Dr Ciottone is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, and an Instructor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health (HSPHS). He is the founder and director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Fellowship in Disaster Medicine, the first 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. He also serves as a consultant to the White House Medical Unit.

Dr Ciottone has taught educational programmes in Disaster Medicine and Emergency Management in over 30 countries around the world and has consulted domestically for the US State Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and the White House Medical Unit. He has written over 100 scholarly works, including the first and second edition of the leading textbook in the field, Ciottone’s Disaster Medicine, and in 2016 was recognised by the Physician to the President for: “Outstanding Achievement in support of The White House Medical Unit and The President of The United States.” Dr Ciottone was the 2018 recipient of the Disaster Medical Sciences Award from the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Dr Ciottone’s clinical and field experience includes 25 years as a practicing emergency physician and over 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 have trained over 50,000 healthcare providers, and later helped lead an International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear accident preparedness programme for Eastern Europe. He also served as commander of one of the first federal disaster medical assistance teams (DMAT Massachuestts-2) into Ground Zero during the World Trade Center disaster on September 11, 2001, and has deployed to a number of other crises around the world, including the Haiti earthquake. Dr Ciottone has held visiting professorship posts in Disaster Medicine at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and Universita del Piemonte Orientale in Italy.