Stuart is the founder and Chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Division of Wilderness Medicine. In 2022, he became founder and Chief of the MGH SPEAR (SPace, Ecological, Arctic, and Resource-limited) MED Division. He is the founder and Director of the MGH Wilderness Medicine Fellowship (2005) and the MGH-Baylor Space Medicine Fellowship (2022). He is a full-time clinician (attending physician) in the MGH Emergency Department (ED), Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, and affiliated faculty member at the Arctic Initiative at the Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He works as an emergency physician and faculty with Alaska Native populations in Kotzebue, Alaska. He is a Fellow with the Explorers Club (NYC).
He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the authoritative textbook: Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine (Resource-limited Medicine Under Austere Conditions), 8th Edition. He was Associate Editor of the 7th Edition. In 2005-06 in the Everest region, his team pioneered the use of pre-hospital ultrasound to diagnose high altitude pathology. This has now become the standard of care. In 2011, he performed the first ultrasound on the summit of N. America (Denali) as a member of a National Park Service Climbing Patrol led by former “Med in the Wild” instructor, David Weber. He led an international disaster response to Kesennuma, Miyagi-ken immediately following the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake/Tsunami and has led high altitude research on Mt. Kilimanjaro with the U.S. Army Institute for Environmental Medicine. In 2019, he pioneered the first use of inhaled nitric oxide as therapy in the ED as the primary investigator of NO COV-ED (to treat acute COVID). Stuart’s career has focused on health as an ecological phenomenon. His research has investigated the pathogenesis and treatment of high-altitude illness and other fundamental mediators of health. His teaching has transformed medicine’s awareness of the interplay between climate change, environmental conditions and human health.
Stuart is co-creator and faculty on the month-long senior medical student course, Medicine in the Wild with NOLS Wilderness Medicine -- now with 18+ years of graduates, many of whom are now renowned experts in climate change, wilderness and space medical research and policy.
Prior to medical school, Stuart was a NOLS student (FSR ‘Dave’, ’87), worked entirely too briefly as a NOLS Instructor (wilderness and sea-kayaking in Lower 48, Alaska), was the first gaijin (foreigner) to teach English in his rural village of Iwaizumi, Iwate, Japan, earned his Black belt in Shodokan Judo, was Bronze Medalist in U.S. Whitewater Open Canoe Slalom Nationals, and a commercial fisherman in Alaska (long-lining for black cod and seining for salmon).
He is the father of Walker (Alaska Wilderness Course grad ‘18), Emma (Baja BOT ’19), and Elizabeth, and husband of Malinda Polk (Baja Sailing ’24). Any day that he gets on his mountain bike is a good one.