Session Chair Profile

Elizabeth Baca

Biography

Dr. Elizabeth Baca is passionate about innovations to foster total health and well-being. She currently serves as the Senior Health Advisor in the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR). She is engaged in innovation in the public sector to foster health through multiple projects including healthy planning, big data, and public-private partnerships. For healthy planning she works across sectors to foster collaboration, elevate the connection between health and the built environment, and leads the effort to incorporate health considerations into the planning process to build healthy, resilient communities. A significant part of her work is aligning win-wins for projects that offer co-benefits, particularly with respect to climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. For big data, she is working on projects to link data sets to the planning process. Additionally, she serves as a lead for the Governor’s Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine. Through her role in OPR, she is an advisor for the USGBC Building Health Initiative and FS6, a new Food System Accelerator. Previously, she served on the General Pediatric Faculty at Stanford Medical School and directed the Community Pediatric and Child Advocacy Rotation. In addition to teaching medical students and residents about the social, economic, and environmental factors that affect health, Dr. Baca was the lead faculty mentor on several projects to increase access to healthy foods, reduce environmental triggers of asthma, increase physical activity opportunities, and improve the built environment. Dr. Baca studied health policy at Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela. She completed her Masters in Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and her Doctorate of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Baca completed her pediatric residency in the Pediatric Leadership for the Underserved (PLUS) program at University of California, San Francisco.