Keynote Speakers
Dr. Katherine A. Flores, MD
Director, UCSF Fresno Latino Center for Medical Education and Research
UC San Francisco, Associate Clinical Professor
Dr. Katherine Flores was born into an immigrant Mexican family in Fresno, California, and worked as a migrant farmworker for the first 16 years of her life. She received her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, her medical degree from the University of California, Davis and completed her family residency training at the University of California, San Francisco Fresno program. Since then, she has spent her professional career as a family physician in private practice within an all-woman, bilingual medical group in Fresno, CA, which serves families from widely varying economic and ethnic backgrounds.
Dr. Flores is also an Associate Clinical Professor in Family Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine and the Director of the UCSF Fresno Latino Center for Medical Education and Research (LaCMER). The LaCMER is a unit of the UCSF Fresno Medical Education Program located in California’s Central San Joaquin Valley. The overall mission of LaCMER is to work with disadvantaged students and help prepare them to become healthcare professionals who will ultimately return to the Central Valley to provide culturally competent healthcare to the medically underserved.
Dr. Flores has been active over the past 30 years in developing and overseeing programs that recruit and retain Latino and other underrepresented youth into the health professions. She has worked collaboratively with multiple partners to establish a comprehensive health careers pipeline program in the Central Valley of California, targeting disadvantaged youth, particularly from migrant farmworker backgrounds. The goal of these programs, the Junior and High School Doctors Academies and the Health Careers Opportunity Program at California State University, Fresno, is to academically enrich, nurture and support disadvantaged youth from the 7th grade through college to assure their academic success and ultimate acceptance into health professional schools. Incorporated within the developed curriculum is a research focus that requires these students to explore health disparity issues in their local communities and provides them the scientific research skills necessary to address them. These programs also emphasize service learning, advocacy, cultural competence and cultural humility.
Through her work in developing health professions pathway programs for disadvantaged students, Dr. Flores and others jointly formed the California Health Professions Consortium in 2006 to explore the development of a statewide strategy to address increasing the diversity of the healthcare workforce. The Consortium has grown to include members from academic institutions (faculty and administrators from universities and health professions schools), K-12 educators, direct service providers (hospitals, clinics, health plans, nurses, and physicians), health policy advocates, and others who have similar interests.
Dr. Flores is the Past Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Hispanic Medical Association and serves on many national and statewide committees and boards.
Dr. Tomas Magaña, MD
Tomás A. Magaña, MD, MA, FAAP is a physician, program director, educator and advocate dedicated to improving care and health outcomes for the country’s most vulnerable children.
Dr. Magaña is a leading expert in the design and implementation of health workforce pipeline programs for youth and young adults. As a Principal Investigator at the Public Health Institute in Oakland, CA, Dr. Magaña serves as Director of the SF BUILD APP (Aspiring Physicians Program) at San Francisco State University. SF BUILDAPP is a program of the UCSF Latinx Center of Excellence. Additionally, Dr. Magaña is Founding Director of the award-winning FACES for the Future Coalition, a collaborative of national programs designed to prepare disadvantaged youth for entry into college and careers in the health professions. FACES programs provide an array of holistic services that support the development and training of youth who have been historically excluded from traditional health careers educational programs. To date, FACES programs have served more than 1800 youth nationally with greater than 90% who have graduated from high school and transitioned on to post-secondary educational programs. Dr. Magaña is actively leading the efforts to disseminate the successful FACES model throughout the nation. His work with youth has been featured on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, NBC Bay Area News, the San Francisco Chronicle and in People Magazine.
Dr. Magaña is a board-certified pediatrician with expertise in the care of vulnerable children and adolescents, including those impacted by the juvenile justice and foster care systems, immigration and community violence. He is a Lead Physician in the Department of School-Based Health Centers at La Clínica de La Raza, Inc. where he serves the complex medical needs of diverse youth from Alameda County. He is also Assistant Professor/Medical Director in the Masters Physician Assistant Department at Samuel Merritt University and an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. Previously, Dr. Magaña was a member of the Division of Adolescent Medicine at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, where he served as Medical Director of Alameda County’s Juvenile Justice Center and attending physician at the Youth Uprising School-Based Health Center in East Oakland, CA.
Dr. Magaña is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a Commissioner of First 5 Alameda County, and has served on a number of regional and national advisory boards focusing on pediatric health issues, healthcare workforce development and cultural competency in medicine. Dr. Magaña received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University, his Masters degree from U.C. Berkeley, and his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. He completed his pediatric residency at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland.
Dr. Magaña is a first generation college graduate, and has dedicated much of his life to serve underserved communities. He has a passion for programs that foster leadership, wellness and professional development for youth.