Commission Membership

Monica Ruiz is a Pediatric Critical Care Medicine fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is a recent Texas transplant in the great state of California. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin. During her undergraduate education she participated in numerous global health trips, which unveiled a deep passion for public health, specifically, understanding the social determinants of health. This prompted her to pursue a dual MD/MPH degree at The University of Texas at San Antonio School of Medicine. She spent her medical education participating in community-based interventions in neighborhoods along the Texas-Mexico border and ultimately, completed her thesis on preventing mosquito born illness in lower socioeconomic communities. She went on to complete her pediatric residency at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she continued her public health work. During residency she was awarded a research grant to examine the efficacy of utilizing the train-the-trainer model for Zika virus prevention strategies in vulnerable populations. Her work in community health and advocacy extended to include, serving as a National Delegate for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Furthermore, she discovered that the extreme presentations of preventable disease in vulnerable populations intersected with her love of physiology in the pediatric intensive care unit. As a critical care medicine fellow, she is currently examining the biological effects of stress in early childhood, via hair cortisol measurements, to better understand and contribute to what is known about the inequities in healthcare outcomes among disenfranchised populations. She is committed to a career in academia and plans to align her work in health equity with her role as a physician scientist by working to diversify academic medicine. While at Stanford Medicine she has also completed the Leadership Education in Advancing Diversity (LEAD) curriculum.