Dr. Nadine Burke Harris

Dr. Burke Harris has spent her career on the front lines of some of our world’s most pressing public health challenges. As California’s first-ever Surgeon General, she helped guide the state’s COVID response and successfully launched a first-in-the-nation statewide effort to train over 20,000 primary care providers on how to screen for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and respond with trauma-informed care. She has dedicated her work to serving vulnerable communities and combating the root causes of health disparities.

After completing her MPH at Harvard and residency at Stanford, she founded a clinic in one of San Francisco’s most underserved communities, Bayview Hunters Point. It was there that Burke Harris identified ACEs as a major risk factor affecting the health of her patients and applied research from the CDC and Kaiser Permanente to develop a novel clinical screening protocol. She went on to found the Center for Youth Wellness in 2011 to advance pediatric medicine, raise public awareness, and transform the way society responds to children exposed to ACEs and toxic stress.

Her work has been profiled in best-selling books including How Children Succeed by Paul Tough and Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance as well as in Jamie Redford’s feature film, Resilience. Her book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity was called “indispensable” by The New York Times. She has also been featured on NPR, CNN, and Fox News as well as in USA Today.