Devika Bhushan

Background

About Devika Bhushan

Devika Bhushan, MD, is a pediatrician and public health leader on a mission to drive health innovation, resilience, and equity. Her expertise spans trauma-informed systems, stress and resilience, mental health, gender and health equity, and public health — featured in NPR, NBC, Sesame Workshop, Rolling Stone, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, Yahoo, The Lancet, Pediatrics, and JAMA. Dr. Bhushan serves as as an adjunct faculty member at Stanford and as a senior strategic advisor to entities that aim to advance health, innovation, and equity — ranging from non-profits to venture capital investment to startups. She frequently advises on mental health representation in the arts, including to playwright V (formerly Eve Ensler) and Sesame Workshop. She is writing a children's book series focused on stress and resilience, in partnership with Dr. Bruce Perry. Dr. Bhushan serves on several national advisories and Boards, including the national Board of Directors of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental) and the California Partners Project. As California’s Acting Surgeon General (2022) and its inaugural Chief Health Officer (2019-2022), Dr. Bhushan was a key public health spokesperson and advisor to California's Governor. In these roles, she led policy and practice innovation at a statewide level by co-leading the launch and implementation of the ACEs Aware initiative, focused on healing from childhood trauma. Dr. Bhushan is also an award-winning mental health spokesperson, known for publicly sharing her own journey with bipolar disorder while serving as California’s Acting Surgeon General to destigmatize mental illness and spread hope. She appears in the PBS documentary BrainStorm. Dr. Bhushan trained at Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins. She is a parent, an immigrant, and a first-generation Indian American.