Paul Charlton, MD | Safia Rubaii, MD | Valerie Dobiesz, MD

Paul Charlton, MD, MA works as an emergency medicine physician at the Gallup Indian Medical Center where he currently serves as the emergency department director. He completed medical school at Dartmouth and his residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Washington/Harborview. Dr. Charlton also holds a master’s degree from Georgetown University in Conflict Resolution, which drives his motivation to improve health care systems to address issues of quality, equity, and social justice. In addition to his clinical contributions, his academic niche is conflict management and health care, for which he holds academic affiliations with several universities focused on this topic. He lives in Gallup, New Mexico, with his wife and two children, and is an active climber and trail runner.

Safia Rubaii, MD, works as an IHS emergency physician at Gallup Indian Medical Center, in Gallup, NM. Born in Iowa, she has lived mostly in Florida, Colorado, and New Mexico. She started working in healthcare as a nursing home “kitchen girl,” then as a nurse’s aide, before completing nursing school at the University of South Florida. She worked as an RN in a variety of settings (education, urban and rural emergency, ICU, and OB at a large urban hospital; migrant health; and as a Boulder Community Hospital eye health volunteer in Mante, Mexico). She attended medical school at the University of Colorado, with electives in tropical medicine/infectious disease at Cayetano Heredia in Peru and in Costa Rica (LSU). She completed her internal medicine internship in Colorado, and her emergency medicine residency at the University of Florida. After working briefly at the Yukon Kuskokwim Hospital in Bethel, Alaska, she worked at the Navajo hospital in Tuba City and in rural Colorado before coming to Gallup Indian Medical Center. She completed the DTM&H program at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Besides under-served and native health care, compassion in healthcare, and the change process; she is passionate about languages, and has an MA in Linguistics from the University of South Florida. She loves to learn, hike, back-country ski, cycling, dance, and study Classical Literary Tibetan and the arts, especially ceramics.

Valerie Dobiesz, MD, MPH, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, is an emergency physician working clinically at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Tséhootsooí Medical Center in Fort Defiance and serves as the Director of the Front Line Indigenous Partnership (FLIP) Program which is dedicated to improving AIAN health and eliminating existing health disparities. She is a core faculty in the BWH department’s Office of Inclusion Diversity, Equity and Social Justice and a core faculty member of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) where she directs programs on Indigenous Health Disparities and Medical Education in War and Conflict. She is nationally recognized for her emergency medicine courses for medical professionals in the areas of simulation education, women’s health, gender equity, pediatrics, orthopedics, and wilderness and expedition medicine. To address the lack of a sufficient AIAN healthcare workforce she partners with Tribal leaders on developing and supporting multiple pathway programs for Indigenous youth to pursue healthcare careers including the Ohiyesa Premedical Program, Saint Michael Indian School Premedical Society, San Carlos Apache Premedical Summer Program, North American Center of Boston Medicine Ways Pathway Program, and the relaunching of the National Native American Youth Initiative program in collaboration with the Association of American Indian Physicians. She has presented over 200 national and over 100 international lectures on a variety of subspecialties in emergency medicine in Peru, India, Nepal, Tanzania, Antarctica, Cuba, the Philippines, Haiti, Galapagos, Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, Fiji, New Zealand, Bhutan, Ukraine, and Argentina.