Craig Spencer, MD, MPH is an emergency medicine physician, public health researcher, and Associate Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy, and Practice at Brown University School of Public Health. His work spans global health and domestic community engagement — connecting nearly two decades of frontline humanitarian experience to an emerging body of research and practice focused on rebuilding public trust in American health institutions.
Dr. Spencer's field work has taken him across Africa and Southeast Asia as a physician and epidemiologist with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), including leading outbreak investigations in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Chad, and serving as a coordinator of MSF's national epidemiological response during the West Africa Ebola epidemic.
This community-engaged background in global health now drives his domestic work. Dr. Spencer is building In Health We Trust, a national research program based at Brown University but focused on community engagement and on understanding how Americans relate to health — their beliefs, experiences, and sources of trust — as a foundation for building a more responsive and equitable public health system in the United States. The program draws on approaches developed across global health contexts, applying them to the particular challenges of trust-building in American communities, including those historically underserved or alienated by public health institutions.
He also works at the policy-practice interface. In 2026, Dr. Spencer co-organized the Making States Healthy Again policy accelerator with The States Forum — a convening in Ohio that brought together public health researchers, state lawmakers, grassroots community organizers, tribal council representatives, and supporters of the MAHA movement to develop concrete, state-level solutions to environmental health challenges. The accelerator was a deliberate exercise in bridge-building across political and ideological divides, modeling the kind of cross-sector collaboration that Dr. Spencer argues is essential to effective public health practice today.
His scholarship examines the historical determinants of public health, with a focus on how past failures of communication, equity, and institutional accountability shape present-day health outcomes — and what evidence-based approaches to community engagement can do to address them. He frequently shares his insights on public health and policy through writing, with pieces featured in leading outlets such as the New England Journal of Medicine, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Politico, STATNews, Los Angeles Times, Council on Foreign Relations’ Think Global Health, USA Today, and more.
In 2024, Dr. Spencer joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a life member. He currently serves on the board of advisors for Doctors Without Borders USA and The New Humanitarian.
Dr. Spencer practices clinically as an emergency medicine physician at Rhode Island Hospital and The Miriam Hospital.
