Jennifer Tsai, MD, M.Ed

Resident Physician

Yale School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine

Jennifer Tsai is a physician, writer, educator, and advocate. Using activism and disruptive pedagogy, she seeks to rethink and advance health and climate justice, expand social medicine praxis, and support equity across health systems. She is an Emergency Medicine doctor in New Haven, Connecticut, with professional experience in basic science, healthcare consulting, journalism, and humanities research. Her academic work centers on the intersection between race, medicine, and inequity. Her essays and reflections have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Scientific American, The Washington Post, ELLE Magazine, STATnews, and the Journal of the American Medical Association among other outlets. Jennifer’s education work is inspired by 1980’s Critical Race Theory movement, which challenged the shortcomings of legal education by mobilizing an unrealized imagination: “What would the legal landscape look like today if people of color were the decision-makers?” Her classrooms pose similar questions: What would medicine—its training, practice, and presumption—look like today if it were created by the scholarship and experiences of vigorously diverse people: people who are impoverished, sociologists, humanitarians, queer, sick, differently-abled, of color? What forces influence bodies, health, justice, and medicine? Jennifer was a 2014 Humanity in Action Fellow. She received undergraduate degrees in Ethnic Studies and Human Biology from Brown University, graduated from The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in 2019, and received a Masters of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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