Valerie Dobiesz, MD, MPH

Valerie Dobiesz, MD, MPH, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, is an emergency physician working clinically at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Tséhootsooí Medical Center in Fort Defiance and serves as the Director of the Front Line Indigenous Partnership (FLIP) Program which is dedicated to improving American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) health and eliminating existing health disparities. She is a core faculty in the BWH emergency department’s Office of Inclusion Diversity, Equity and Social Justice and a core faculty member of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) where she directs programs on Indigenous Health Disparities and Medical Education in War and Conflict. She is nationally recognized for her emergency medicine courses for medical professionals in the areas of simulation education, maternal health, gender equity, orthopedics, and wilderness and expedition medicine. To address the lack of a sufficient AIAN healthcare workforce she partners with Tribal leaders on developing and supporting multiple pathway programs for Indigenous youth to pursue healthcare careers including the Medicine Pathways to Advancing Tribal Healthcare program, Saint Michael Indian School Premedical Society, San Carlos Apache Premedical Summer Program, North American Center of Boston Medicine Ways Pathway Program, and the relaunching of the National Native American Youth Initiative program in collaboration with the Association of American Indian Physicians. She has presented over 200 national and over 100 international lectures on a variety of subspecialties in emergency medicine in Peru, India, Nepal, Tanzania, Antarctica, Cuba, the Philippines, Haiti, Galapagos, Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, Fiji, New Zealand, Bhutan, Ukraine, and Argentina.