Core Faculty

  • N. Stuart Harris is the founder and Chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital Division of Wilderness Medicine, and the founding Director of the MGH Wilderness Medicine Fellowship. He is the founding Chief of MGH SPEAR (Space, Ecological, Arctic, and Resource-limited) Med. .

    He is a full-time attending physician in the MGH Emergency Department and an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is Faculty Affiliate at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Harris' Arctic work experience extends from the Gulf of Alaska (commercial fisherman) to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta tundra and Cherski, Siberia (NSF-funded field medical support for Woodwell Climate Research Center), to the summit of Denali (mountaineer/ physician with the National Park Service) to community care in remote Native Alaskan communities (Kotzebue). Working with colleagues in Kotzebue, Alaska, he helped found Siamit to learn from and contribute expertise to community care in remote Native Alaskan communities.

    Harris’s research focuses on investigating the pathogenesis and treatment of acute hypoxia/ high altitude illness, advancing medical expertise into remote and underserved areas, on the interplay between ecological forces and human health, and the impact of climate change as a healthcare emergency. His high-altitude research has spanned from the Everest Region, to Denali, Kilimanjaro, Japan, and N. America.Along with MGH WM Fellowship graduate, Dr. Tracy Farkas Cushing, he served as Associate Editor of Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine (7th Edition).To teach a new generation the concepts and vocabulary of an ecological view of health, since 2005 he is Co-director/ faculty of the NOLS “Medicine in the Wild” course for senior medical students, most often in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. He is Chair of the NOLS Board of Trustees.

    Dr. Harris is father of Walker, Emma, and Elizabeth and husband to Malinda Polk. A key quality of life metric is “Did I get on my MT bike for a ride today (tonight) in the Blue Hills?”

  • Dr Antonsen founded is the director of the Space Medicine Fellowship. He is also an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at MGH and a lecturer with the AeroAstro Engineering Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also holds a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

    He continues to do research developing advanced risk assessment and analysis capabilities for space medicine, AI in medicine, and space health systems design and edited the recently published textbook Systems Medicine for Human Spaceflight. His previous role includes the Element Scientist for Exploration Medical Capabilities in the NASA Human Research.

  • Luke Apisa is the Assistant Fellowship Director of the MGH Division of Wilderness Medicine and the inaugural fellow of MGH’s Space Medicine program. Dr. Apisa is a Clinical Instructor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He continues to be active in Arctic affairs through the Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative and ongoing work with the Maniilaq Health Center in Kotzebue, AK on quality improvement, virtual medicine, and austere healthcare. During his fellowship year he spent a season researching changes in human cardiopulmonary dynamics at altitude in Pheriche, Nepal. Ongoing topics of interest include high altitude pathology and the application of terrestrial hypobaric hypoxia research to space vehicle atmospheric design.He continues to do research developing advanced risk assessment and analysis capabilities for space medicine, AI in medicine, and space health systems design and edited the recently published textbook Systems Medicine for Human Spaceflight. His previous role includes the Element Scientist for Exploration Medical Capabilities in the NASA Human Research.

  • Dr Lonnie Petersen M.D., Ph.D. is a professor of Aerospace Engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT as well as the Harvard-MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology. She was also appointed the Samuel A Goldblith Career Development Professor of Applied Biology.

    Dr Petersen leads the Aerospace Physiology Lab and conducts research relating to human health and performance during spaceflight, aviation, search and rescue, as well as technology and device development and human-hardware interaction. Her work is supported by NASA, DoD, NSF, and Draper labs. Her clinical background is from anesthesiology and her service is in prehospital care and remote area medicine and she has served in Greenland.

  • Dr. Fischetti is an attending physician in Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is board-certified in Emergency Medicine and completed a fellowship and certification in Point-of-Care Ultrasound. She received her undergraduate degrees in Neuroscience and Sociology from the University of Southern California (USC) and her medical degree from UC Irvine School of Medicine. She then completed her residency in Emergency Medicine at Duke and her ultrasound fellowship at UC Irvine. During the pandemic, Dr. Fischetti worked in several regions of the country staffing hospitals all around the United States. She was formerly the Chief Medical Officer of artificial intelligence company, Centaur Labs, based in Boston before joining MGB.

    Her research has been focused on ultrasound imaging for low-resource environments, including rural locations and applications for space medicine. Specifically, her focus is on developing a standardized training curriculum for space travel and in-flight emergencies. 

    She has taught point-of-care ultrasound domestically and internationally, in locations as wide ranging as the Navajo Reservation to Martha’s Vineyard to Saudi Arabia. Dr. Fischetti recently completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Maseru, Lesotho working at Partners in Health Lesotho training up clinicians in remote parts of the country how to perform hands-on ultrasound for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis assessments and obstetric needs.

  • Ali S. Raja, MD, DBA, MPH, FACHE is the Executive Vice Chair for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Mass General Brigham, the Mooney-Reed Endowed Chair at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Board-certified in both emergency medicine and clinical informatics, he received his MD and MBA from Duke, MPH from Harvard, and DBA from Case Western. After training in emergency medicine at the University of Cincinnati, Dr. Raja completed a research fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He remained on staff at BWH, eventually assuming the role of Vice Chair of Network Development, until he left for MGH. After a 10-year career at MGH as the Executive Vice Chair, he took on a new consolidated role overseeing both hospitals' emergency departments in 2024.

    A practicing emergency physician and author of over 300 publications, including two textbooks and a children’s book series, his research focuses on improving the appropriateness of resource utilization in emergency medicine. He serves as president of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine and the Massachusetts Chapter of the American College of Healthcare Executives, and he sits on the boards of Boston MedFlight and the Spaulding Rehabilitation Network. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine’s Journal Watch Emergency Medicine.

    Dr. Raja is also an expert on managing critically ill patients in the emergency department and prehospital arenas. He has served as a critical care air transport team commander and flight surgeon for the United States Air Force, a civilian flight physician, a tactical physician for the FBI, Massachusetts State Police, and Cincinnati Police Department, and a physician with MA-1 DMAT.