Dr. Pouné Saberi, MD, MPH, is a board-certified Occupational and Environmental Medicine physician based in Philadelphia with a career built on a simple but radical premise: the environment is not background noise — it is medicine. Trained at Tufts University School of Medicine, she began her clinical journey in full-spectrum primary care, completing her residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and practicing for a decade before making a deliberate pivot. Compelled by the questions primary care couldn’t fully answer — why certain patients, in certain places, kept getting sick in certain ways — she retrained and became board-certified in Occupational and Environmental Medicine through the American Board of Preventive Medicine.
At the VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, Dr. Saberi has built something genuinely rare. She oversees occupational health policy interpretation and serves as the clinical lead for Occupational and Environmental Medicine across a regional VA network spanning nine facilities. Her Philadelphia clinic is a full-spectrum OEM practice — and uniquely, it houses the environmental medicine consult service she founded and oversees, one of the first of its kind in the VA system, where veterans carrying unexplained symptoms finally get the lifetime exposure assessments and environmental histories that conventional medicine too often never thinks to ask for. Her clinic sits at the intersection of where people work, where they live, and what that costs them.
Her academic and research life runs in parallel. A published author in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, she has co-written several articles exploring the nexus of climate change and occupational and environmental medicine — a frontier the field is only beginning to take seriously. She teaches planetary health and climate change at Cooper Medical School, training future physicians to think beyond the individual patient and toward the systems shaping population health. Her own research on the compounded effects of air pollution and heat has highlighted a significant gap in the evidence base — the kind of gap she finds hard to walk away from.
Much of the past decade of Dr. Saberi’s work has orbited a single, urgent truth: our collective choices about energy sources have consequences that ripple far beyond the atmosphere. Fossil fuels don’t just drive climate disruption and biodiversity loss — they poison air, water, and soil in the communities living closest to extraction and combustion, generate environmental pollution that translates directly into disease, and underwrite the geopolitical instability and conflicts that have sent generations of veterans home with exposures medicine is still learning to name. Energy is not an abstract policy question. It is a public health emergency hiding in plain sight.
Dr. Saberi is also a builder. She founded EnviroMedSphere to advance research, education, and clinical practice in environmental medicine, and has served as board president of both Physicians for Social Responsibility National and its Pennsylvania chapter, where she remains an active board member. As a fellow of the Indo-Pacific Leadership Lab, she has deepened her commitment to the communities on the front lines of climate and environmental harm — particularly indigenous communities whose generational knowledge of ecosystems is an irreplaceable resource in the effort to sustain planetary health. Having spent her career at the crossroads of federal policy interpretation, academic medicine, clinical practice, and nonprofit leadership, she is uniquely positioned to convene the kind of cross-sector think tank that environmental medicine urgently needs — one that connects the dots between science, policy, education, and the communities bearing the heaviest burden.
When she surfaces from all of this — sometimes literally — she’s scuba diving, which turns out to be a perfect reminder of exactly what’s at stake. Whether testifying, teaching, or treating, her north star remains the same: no community should be made sick by the environment it cannot escape.