Dr. Shaw Natsui (UCLA CTSI Scholar) is an emergency medicine physician with an interest in urban health. He trained at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Natsui is a graduate of Harvard College, where he became deeply involved in local youth work and organizing in Boston, first through the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), a student-run, community-based, nonprofit public service organization. He served as President of PBHA, which consists of more than 80 programs, involving 1,500 volunteers and serving 10,000 people in Greater Boston. After graduation, he worked briefly for Physicians for Human Rights on a campaign to reform the juvenile justice system on individual state levels. Dr. Natsui then worked at a local Boston community health center to develop and run multiple programs focused on peer leadership, youth development and youth-led organizing, violence prevention, obesity and diabetes prevention, and mental health intervention.

With the support of the Harvard Trustman Fellowship, Dr. Natsui spent the following 1.5 years in Lima, Peru, working on various projects related to community development and HIV/tuberculosis. He earned his medical degree from the University of Michigan, and obtained a Master of Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he focused on urban and social policy, as a Fellow at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. Dr. Natsui has additionally worked as a public health researcher in the Dominican Republic and as a clinician educator in Peru and Haiti.

During residency, his research focused on acute stroke care for non-English-preferring patients, predictive analytics and machine learning approaches to improving diagnosis, and the ED patient experience. He also helped organize a series of collaborative efforts to improve the ED care for vulnerable patients, particularly the homeless.

Career Interests: Dr. Natsui is interested in improving the quality of acute care delivery and access to care for vulnerable populations. He plans to focus on the implementation science of leveraging health services research to inform and lead multidisciplinary interventions and policies on the local, state, and national levels.

Research Interests: Dr. Natsui is interested in urban health, systems of care delivery, data science including predictive analytics and machine learning, and complex policy analysis.