MD – Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY
Residency – Emergency Medicine, Boston Medical Center, Boston, MA

Biography: Dr. Jessica Faiz, emergency medicine physician, focuses her work on increasing physician workforce diversity, structuring inclusive work environments, and promoting equitable access to care for racially and ethnically diverse patient populations.  

Prior to NCSP, Dr. Faiz graduated from Brown University where she received her B.S. in Human Biology. In 2012, she went on to work as a New York public school teaching assistant in the South Bronx, where she developed a passion for promoting diversity and social justice. Dr. Faiz received her medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where she founded a pathway program to recruit high school students to medicine and the sciences. She was accepted into the emergency medicine residency program at Boston Medical Center in 2017 where she continued her training in a mission driven and safety-net hospital. During her residency, she served as the chair of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee and on the national stage, chaired the Diversity and Inclusion Committee of the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association. In 2020, Dr. Faiz was elected Chief Resident and earned the honor of being selected as the Massachusetts College of Emergency Physicians’ Resident of the Year in 2021.  

As a scholar, Dr. Faiz works clinically at the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital emergency department (ED). Her research interests are in promoting physician workforce diversity and racial equity, publishing a study entitled “Racial equity in linkage to inpatient opioid use disorder treatment in patients that received emergency care” shortly after beginning her fellowship. Dr. Faiz was later awarded a $30,000 locally initiated project grant by the Center for Healthcare Innovation, Implementation and Policy in 2022 to perform a program evaluation focusing on racial and ethnic disparities of the nationally-expanding Tele-Emergency Care program at VA. 

Most recently, Dr. Faiz’s work on racial and ethnic differences in systemic barriers for those taking the Medical Colleges Admissions Test was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Health Forum, and also featured in various mainstream media outlets including NPR, Forbes and Politico. Her current research partners with the UCLA health system to increase access to care for Medi-Cal insured patients in the ambulatory care setting, and the findings of her qualitative study, “Frontline perspectives on barriers to ambulatory care for patients with California Medicaid,” were presented at both the Society for General Internal Medicine and Academy Health conferences in 2023. 

Dr. Faiz also serves as the UCLA site representative on the National NCSP Recruitment and Marketing Committee and the UCLA site NCSP social media manager. She has served as a program facilitator for the Structural Racism Health Equity curriculum at the David Geffen School of Medicine, developed lectures on structural racism and health for the UCLA internal medicine residency didactic curriculum, and teaches medical students in preparation for their core clerkship in emergency medicine. During her fellowship, she remained active in national emergency medicine organizations and continued to lead the “Diversity Mentorship Initiative” with the American College of Emergency Physicians and Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association.  

Dr. Faiz looks forward to continuing her work here in Los Angeles as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine, having accepted a dual research faculty position at the Greater Los Angeles VA and UCLA.