June 2024 Champion: Chethan Sarabu

Blog > Champions of the Month > June 2024 Champion: Chethan Sarabu

June 25, 2024 | By: Ira Dreyfuss

Chethan Sarabu, MD, FAMIA, FAAP


Photo provided by Chethan Sarabu

It sounds like a strained analogy, but it’s true: for plants and children, being in the right place with the right conditions is important to thrive. Not many people can claim expertise in both areas, but Chethan Sarabu, a New York City pediatrician, can.

It started at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

“I was a pre-med student, taking biology classes, and one day I discovered this roomful of plants, and people designing models and drawing, and I was like, ‘This looks like a magical place,’” Dr. Sarabu says.  “It transformed my career and the way I thought about health. Landscape architecture is fundamentally about the design of space in consideration of natural ecology – how our health as humans is inextricably linked to the health of the planet.”

Also at Cornell, Dr. Sarabu got involved in another field that links things together — informatics, and he discovered the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He says landscape architecture, which fits people and plants into an integrated pattern, prepared him for integrating health and technology.

Dr. Sarabu graduated in 2009 with degrees in landscape architecture and biological sciences. He went on to get his MD at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.

With a background in health and nature, it was only natural that Dr. Sarabu wanted to apply his skills to the climate crisis, and nature — unfortunately — obliged with motivation. In 2016, when he moved west to Stanford University for a fellowship in clinical informatics, he was introduced to wildfire season. He was working as a pediatrician with underserved minority children in the Bay Area, and he saw the effects that the smoke had on young lungs.

For Dr. Sarabu, the question now became, “How do I put all this together to really focus on the greatest health threat that we’re all facing, which is climate change?”

One crucial issue he is tackling is how to use informatics to predict risk in a way that allows targeted treatment and proper response from the medical community. Dr. Sarabu says that the big challenge, reducing emissions from the system itself, includes myriad little challenges, such as which inhaler to prescribe. The inhalers use propellant gases, and switching to nonpolluting gases can reduce a lot of pollution when you multiply the inhalers across the population of people with respiratory conditions.  “You can make a significant difference,” he says.