A'lai Alvarez, MD | Facilitated by Sheryl Bahe Livingston, MA, LPCC and Safia Rubaii, MD, MPH

Al’ai Alvarez, MD (@alvarezzzy) is a national leader and educator on wellness, diversity, equity, and Inclusion. He is a clinical associate professor of Emergency Medicine (EM) and Well-Being Director at Stanford Emergency Medicine. He co-leads the Human Potential Team and serves as the Stanford EM Physician Wellness Fellowship Director. Dr. Alvarez is the chair of Stanford WellMD’s Physician Wellness Forum and the director of Stanford’s peer-to-peer support for faculty and trainees, the Physician Resource Network (PRN) Support Program. His work focuses on humanizing physician roles as individuals and teams by harnessing the individual human potential in the context of high-performance teams. This includes optimizing the interconnectedness between Process Improvement (Quality and Clinical Operations), Recruitment (Diversity and Representation), and Well-being (Inclusion and Belonging). He is one of the 2021-2022 Faculty Fellows at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign. Dr. Alvarez gives several grand rounds and national/international conference lectures and workshops on relevant topics in self-compassion, physician well-being, and high-performance teams, including increasing leadership capacity and mentorship to enhance diversity and inclusion.

Sheryl Bahe Livingston was born and raised on the Dine reservation, outside of the Gallup, NM city limits. Sheryl is of the Towering House clan, born for the Meadow People. She is licensed as a Professional Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LPCC) in the state of New Mexico. Sheryl currently works at Gallup Indian Medical Center (IHS). At GIMC, she facilitates SBIRT sessions with patients referred by the Emergency Department. Sheryl received her Masters Degree in Counseling from the University of New Mexico and a Bachelors Degree in Sociology with an emphasis in Gerontology and Medical Care from Northern Arizona Univeristy. She has taught special education, early intervention with birth to 5 children, and has worked with New Mexico State Probation and Parole in providing clinical counseling for clients reintegrating into their community. Sheryl shares one of her favorite quotes “Your mental health is everything- prioritize it. Make the time like your life depends on it, because it does.” – Mel Robbins.

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.