Devika Bhushan M.D.

Devika Bhushan, M.D., is a pediatrician, public health leader, and writer on a mission to drive health innovation, equity, and resilience. Previously, as California’s Acting Surgeon General, Dr. Bhushan was a key public health spokesperson and advisor to the California Governor. Dr. Bhushan’s policy, research, and clinical expertise spans trauma-informed systems, stress and resilience, mental health, and gender and health equity. Her work has been featured in The Lancet, Pediatrics, National Public Radio (NPR), The Los Angeles Times, and Healthy Children.

She has served on Stanford’s faculty and trained at Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins. Dr. Bhushan serves as a senior advisor to entities that aim to advance health, innovation, and equality, including the Weitzman Institute, focused on primary care innovation, GreyMatter, a venture capital fund dedicated to mental health innovation, and Health Management Associates, focused on health policy and strategy. Dr. Bhushan is committed to destigmatizing living with serious mental illness and to promoting healing; to this end, she has shared her own journey with bipolar disorder publicly and is building a vibrant community to advance well-being through a monthly newsletter and YouTube channel. Having grown up between the Philippines, India, and the United States, Dr. Bhushan is an immigrant and a first-generation American. She lives in San Francisco with her long-time partner and their son.