A Doctor in the White House
Alumnus Alister Martin is a member of the 2021–2022 class of White House Fellows, the prestigious program that enlists professionals from a cross-section of society to work for a year with White House staff and senior government officials. Martin RC’10 is serving in the Office of the Vice President and the White House Office of Public Engagement. An emergency medical specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, he applies public policy and medicine as a research faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in the Center for Social Justice and Health Equity. His background in politics, policy, and behavioral economics informs his advocacy for using the emergency room to build programs that serve vulnerable patients. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he founded Vot-ER, a nonpartisan voter registration initiative that has organized more than 26,000 health care providers and 500 hospitals to help patients register to vote; Get Waivered, which is using the nation’s emergency rooms to provide opioid addiction treatment; and GOTVax, which leverages a get-out-the-vote model to deliver vaccines at pop-up clinics to vulnerable communities in Boston.
After graduating from Rutgers, Martin, a native of Neptune, New Jersey, earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and his master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. As an undergraduate, Martin was encouraged to become a physician by Kamal Khan LC’79, director of the School of Arts and Sciences’ Office for Diversity and Academic Success in the Sciences. ODASIS supports undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in pursuing careers in medicine and medical research.