Ronak B. Patel

Ronak earned his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco and completed his residency at the Harvard-Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency Program, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. He earned his MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He founded and led the Urbanization and Crisis Program at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative before moving to Stanford University.

Dr. Patel’s work focuses primarily on the challenges and opportunities presented by rapid urbanization for the health and well-being of vulnerable populations and for humanitarian crises. His research focuses on exposing and disaggregating cumulative risks and developing tools and interventions to mitigate these risks to health and development. His recent work has included projects on disaster microinsurance for local market recovery, slum upgrading impacts, refugee integration, social cohesion and resilience to urban violence, fragile cities and indicators for vulnerability and early crisis in urban slums. He works through community based organizations (CBOs) and aid agencies to collect data and test interventions for marginalized populations. In addition to numerous publications and presentations, he has led or participated on multiple expert working groups to develop policies and programs for reducing urban vulnerability, improving operational effectiveness of aid, hea lth outcomes and building resilience.