SOM MLK Jr Birthday & Black History Keynote: "Humanity in Crisis: Fixing the Issue of Inaccessible Solutions"

Thomas Fisher

ABEM-Certified Emergency Physician, Clinical Associate of Medicine, Author of The Emerency: A Year of Healing And Heartbreak in a Chicago ER.

University of Chicago Medical Center

Dr. Thomas Fisher is a board-certified emergency medicine physician at The University of Chicago Medical Center and a Venture Chair at Redesign Health.  As an emergency medicine physician at The University of Chicago Medical Center, Dr. Thomas Fisher works in the same South Side community where he was raised. Committed to providing medical care to the Black community, Dr. Fisher experienced firsthand the crushing pandemic and a violent summer, amidst a failing healthcare system. He documented his harrowing experience in his memoir, The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER. He writes about the limited time and resources to treat incoming patients—for patients who came into the ward, sometimes he only had three minutes to spend with them. In this riveting, pulse-pounding story of a year in the life of an emergency room doctor, Dr. Fisher connects these human stories to the unjust, profit-hungry healthcare system and pleads for structural reform that will better serve the community.



With experience in clinical practice, working at the White House, and as an entrepreneur, Dr. Thomas Fisher is an expert on America's healthcare system. He has seen firsthand the racial and wealth disparities in providing care from wait times to accessibility. In his thought-provoking lectures, he speaks on how our country’s healthcare system often treats the poor as expendable and how a three-tiered pandemic has exacerbated the longstanding and increasingly fraught inequities in access.

David Margolius, MD

Director of the Cleveland Department of Health Primary Care Physician & Faculty Co-Lead, Medical Director Leadership Institute, Harvard Medical School Medical Director, Systems Improvement, MetroHealth

City of Cleveland, Ohio

Dr. David Margolius was sworn in as Director of Public Health for the City of Cleveland on August 1st, 2022. Previously the Division Director of General Internal Medicine at MetroHealth, Dr. Margolius brings a decade of experience to the role along with a deep understanding of the impact of Cleveland’s social determinants of health. An active educator, he is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University and was faculty co-lead for the Medical Director Leadership Institute at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care. Dr. Margolius has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals on a wide range of public health topics from COVID-19 response in underserved communities and the opioid crisis, to hypertension in low-income populations and best practices in primary care, preventative medicine and family medicine.

Dr. Margolius holds an MD from Alpert Medical School at Brown University and a BA in biology from Brown. He completed his residency in internal medicine at University of California, San Francisco where he spent his last year as Chief Resident of Quality Improvement and Patient Safety before returning to Cleveland. He lives with his wife and two children in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood of Cleveland.