Eric S. Chivian is the founder and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHGE) at Harvard Medical School, where he is also an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry. Life and career A 1964 graduate of Harvard University (AB, biochemistry), he went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School in 1968. Between 1980 and 2000, Chivian was a staff psychiatrist in the MIT Medical Department. Chivian was the co-founder (with professors Bernard Lown, Herbert L. Abrams, and James E. Muller), treasurer, and member of the board of directors of the organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its efforts to highlight the implications of nuclear conflict for global health. In the mid-1980s, he directed the first scientific survey (under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the MIT Center for International Studies) of American and Soviet teenagers' attitudes about the prospect of nuclear war and their concerns for the future. He was the lead author of a seminal paper on this study in The New England Journal of Medicine He was the senior editor and author for the book Last Aid: The Medical Dimensions of Nuclear War, published by W.H. Freeman and Company in 1983. In the early 1990s, Chivian became involved in efforts to create a greater awareness of the impacts which environmental degradation has on human health and well-being. His second book (as senior editor and lead author) was Critical Condition: Human Health and the Environment. The book, published by MIT Press in 1993, was one of the first books on this topic for a general audience (later editions were published in German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Persian). Chivian founded the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School in 1996, with the mission "to help people understand that our health, and that of our children, depends on the health of the environment and that we must do everything we can to protect it." The center is designated an official "Collaborating Center" of the United Nations Environment Programme. Chivian developed and directed the Harvard Medical School course "Human Health and Global Environmental Change", which he taught for a decade and which has been disseminated to 65 other medical schools, colleges, and universities in the U.S. and abroad; he also designed an intensive annual course on the environment