More About Our Austin Speaker(s)
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Katherine A. Flores, MD , UC San Francisco, Assistant Clinical Professor - Keynote Speaker
Dr. Flores received her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and her medical degree from the University of California, Davis. Since completing her residency training, she has spent her professional career as a family physician in private practice within an all-woman, bilingual medical group in Fresno, CA, which serves families from widely varying economic and ethnic backgrounds.
Dr. Flores is an Assistant Clinical Professor in Family Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine. She is the P.I. and Project Director of the California Border Health Education and Training Centers Program (HETC); the Program Director of the UCSF Fresno Latino Center for Medical Education and Research (LaCMER); the Program Director and PI of the UCSF Health Careers Opportunity Program (HCOP), and the Director and Co-PI of the UCSF Hispanic Center of Excellence (COE) grants.
The LaCMER is a unit of the UCSF Fresno Medical Education Program located in California’s Central San Joaquin Valley. The LaCMER provides multiple programs to address the serious shortage of Latino physicians and other health care professionals in the area. The overall mission of LaCMER is to develop individuals who become health care professionals who will ultimately return to the Central Valley to provide culturally competent health care services to the medically underserved.
Dr. Flores has been very active over the past 20 years in developing and overseeing programs that recruit and retain Latino and other underrepresented youth into the health professions. She has worked collaboratively with multiple partners to establish a comprehensive health careers pipeline program in the Central Valley of California, targeting disadvantaged youth, particularly from migrant farmworker backgrounds. The goal of this program, the Junior and High School Doctors Academies, is to academically enrich, nurture and support disadvantaged youth from the 7th grade to 12th grade to assure their academic success. Incorporated within the developed curriculum is a research focus that requires these students to explore health issues in their local communities and provides them the scientific research skills necessary to address them.
Through her HETC role, Dr. Flores has worked years with the Border communities of California to develop a myriad of programs to better train and educate health professionals at all levels to work with immigrant health issues. She is well versed in working with a variety of entities in partnerships and collaboration to reach the HETC goals of improved health care for border populations.
Through her role as the HCOE and Latino Center Director, Dr. Flores has overseen a number of faculty and fellows as they develop and explore research agendas that focus on Latino health care. Several of the projects she oversees include bi-national research collaboration.