Renzo R. Guinto, MD DrPH is Associate Professor of Global and Planetary Health and Lead of the Planetary Health Initiative at the SingHealth Duke-NUS Global Health Institute (SDGHI), Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore. He is also an affiliate faculty at Duke-NUS’s Signature Research Programme in Health Services & Systems Research. One of the world’s pioneers of the new field of planetary health and Southeast Asia’s leading “pracademic” of climate and health, Renzo works on diverse aspects of the climate and health nexus such as climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable health systems; impacts of climate change on mental health; climate, migration, and health; climate implications for global health interventions; climate and health education; ethical issues around climate and health policy; climate and health governance and diplomacy, among others.
A Senior Honorary Visiting Fellow of the University of Cambridge, Renzo is the convener of Planetary Health Philippines – a community for nation building and planetary healing in the Philippines – and was the former Director of the Planetary and Global Health Program of the St. Luke’s Medical Center College of Medicine in the Philippines and inaugural Chief Scientist of the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health in Malaysia. Currently, Renzo is a member of the National Panel of Technical Experts of the Philippine Climate Change Commission; World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group on the ethics of climate and health; board of directors of Health Systems Global; editorial boards of several journals including The Lancet Planetary Health; and several Lancet Commissions, most notably the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Healthcare and the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health.
An Obama Foundation Asia-Pacific Leader and Aspen Institute New Voices Fellow, Renzo has served as consultant for various organizations including the WHO, World Bank, USAID, and Wellcome. Renzo obtained his Doctor of Public Health from Harvard University and Doctor of Medicine from the University of the Philippines Manila, and received further training from Oxford, LSHTM, Copenhagen, Western Cape, Institute of Tropical Medicine-Antwerp, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm School of Economics, and East-West Center in Hawaii. He has traveled to and lectured in more than 70 countries and 100 universities across the world; published more than 200 reports and articles in scientific journals, books, and popular media; and directed and produced short films that communicate the message of planetary healing to the world.
In 2020, Renzo was included by Tatler Magazine in its Gen.T List of 400 leaders of tomorrow who are shaping Asia’s future. In 2022, he was named one of The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) of the Philippines for pioneering the field of planetary health in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. In 2023, Renzo was awarded the inaugural CUGH-Velji Planetary Health Innovation Award by the Consortium of Universities for Global Health. In 2025, he was bestowed the McNulty Prize for “finding solutions to the urgent global health threat of climate change,” and the inaugural Kiyoshi Kurokawa Award by Japan’s Health and Global Policy Institute for “extraordinary contributions to health policy and innovation in the Asia-Pacific region.”