Austin D. Le, MS, is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria and a climate and health educator. He teaches future and current clinicians how climate change affects patients and how to practice more sustainably. He also creates opportunities for students to become climate and health investigators who can critically evaluate evidence and apply it in clinical care.

Austin began by bringing local climate science into medical education. For his school’s annual Health Disparities Forum, he coordinated a session with the Illinois State Climatologist on climate change’s health impacts in Illinois. He then led a Climate Change Clinical Case Series supported by an American Public Health Association Student Champions for Climate Justice award. Structured as a team-based case competition, it asked students to work through patient scenarios involving extreme heat, air pollution, and vector-borne disease.

Austin also led student teams in two Planetary Health Report Card evaluations of his medical school, in 2025 and 2026. Their findings helped bring climate and health into the core curriculum, including a session intended to reach more than 600 preclinical students. Austin has taught a session on sustainable prescribing practices and helped create a public-facing climate medicine resource site for his medical school.

Austin founded his campus chapter of Medical Students for a Sustainable Future and serves as a national research co-chair. He helped organize the 2026 Climate Health Equity Day research symposium, where students submitted abstracts and more than 70 trainees came together to present and discuss climate and health research. He now leads a climate and health research literacy program in which a cohort of 10 students coordinates journal club sessions and collaborates with The Journal of Climate Change and Health.

Austin is the first medical student to serve on his hospital’s sustainability committee. As a Blair and Georgia Sadler Fellow, he is analyzing inpatient inhaler use to identify opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining high-quality respiratory care. He is working toward practical guidance for lower-emission prescribing.

Alongside his education work, Austin maintains an active research program on climate change’s effects on young people’s physical and mental health, including adolescent climate anxiety. His broader environmental health research examines air pollution and early adversity; at UC Berkeley, where he earned degrees in biology and environmental health sciences, he studied how these exposures relate to telomere length in children. His interests grew from his upbringing in San Jose’s Vietnamese refugee community and his family’s experiences with environmental hazards. He hopes to become a physician-scientist who develops education and research in partnership with communities facing the greatest environmental burdens.

Outside medicine, Austin enjoys ultimate frisbee, pickleball, plant-based cooking, and singing with his medical school’s a cappella group.