KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Thea James, MD, MPH, MBA
Thea James, MD, MPH, MBA, is Vice President of Mission, Associate Chief Medical Officer and Co-Executive Director of the Health Equity Accelerator at Boston Medical Center. She is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Violence Intervention Advocacy Program at BMC. Dr. James is a founding member of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (the HAVI). In 2011 she was appointed to Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence.
As vice president of mission, Dr. James partners with caregivers throughout BMC and coordinates BMC’s relationships and strategic alliances with a wide range of local, state, and national organizations and partners across sectors, to meet the full spectrum of essentials that enables patients and communities to thrive. The intentionality is to foster a strategic ecosystem of growth, innovation, transformation, community collaboration, and effective models of care that are rooted in equity, clinical excellence and economic justice.
Dr. James served on the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine 2009-2012, where she served as chair of the Licensing Committee. She is 2008 awardee of Boston Public Health Commission’s Mulligan Award for public service, and a 2012 recipient of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Role Model Award. She received The Boston Business Journal Healthcare Hero award in 2012 &2015. She was 2014 recipient of the Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Award. The Boston Chamber of commerce awarded Dr. James with the Pinnacle Award in 2015, which honors women in business and the professions. In 2020 Dr. James received the American College of Emergency Medicine Lifetime Achievement Award. Also, in 2020, The History Project presented her with a History Maker Award. Dr. James recently received the inaugural 2020 Thea James Social Emergency Medicine Award from the American College of Emergency Physicians.
Dr. James’ passion is in Public Health both domestically and globally. She was a Supervising Medical Officer on the Boston Disaster Medical Assistance Team (MA-1 DMAT), under the Department of Health and Human Services. She has deployed to post 9/11 in NYC, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, Bam, Iran after the 2003 earthquake, and Port-Au-Prince Haiti after the earthquake of 2010. Dr. James traveled to Haiti with MA-1 DMAT one day after the 2010 earthquake.
A graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine, James trained in Emergency Medicine at Boston City Hospital, where she was a chief resident.
Elena Mendez-Escobar, PhD, MBA
Elena’s passion is to transform systems to improve healthcare, with a focus on underserved populations. At BMCHS she co-leads the Health Equity Accelerator and oversees the Grayken Center for Addiction. Prior to joining BMCHS, she was an Associate Partner at McKinsey where she served clients in the Medicaid space. She co-founded McKinsey’s Center for Societal Benefit through Healthcare, focused on underinvested areas of healthcare such as mental health, addiction, or Social Determinants of Health (SDoH).
Elena holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh and an MBA from MIT Sloan. She has been named a “40 under 40” and a “Power 50 movement maker” by the Boston Business Journal.
