Tess Wiskel, MD is a Climate Change and Human Health Fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment and an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Her focus is on understanding and addressing the health impacts of climate change, centering on extreme weather events in at-risk patient populations.

Tess is interested in using research to guide surveillance, preparation, and response to health impacts of climate change, and to evaluate long term effects of climate-related disasters including migration of communities. She is currently working with a team at CrisisReady on understanding the health impacts of extreme weather events on medically vulnerable populations, with a focus on wildfires in California.

Tess has experience in research, education and advocacy focusing on global and women’s health, including developing an accident and emergency HIV testing program in Belize and educational programs in reproductive health in emergency care. Treating the environmental impacts of health on her patients has motivated her current efforts to address the effects of climate change on health. As a member of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health and a board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania she has addressed the health effects of climate change through local advocacy efforts and developing educational curricula.

After receiving her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Tess served as an AmeriCorps*VISTA doing community health work in the South Bronx. She received her medical degree from the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago and completed Emergency Medicine Residency at Brown University. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Public Health program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

A doctor holds a stethoscope

Young doctors are at COP28, and they've got a message for world leaders

Our climate and health fellow Tess Wiskel says the climate crisis is a health crisis, but COP28 ushered in hope: "The sheer number of talks on health is extraordinary," she said.

Read Now

Issues and Topics