Alister Martin, MD, MPP

CEO, A Healthier Democracy

Dr. Alister Martin is an ER physician and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Kennedy School and was a former Chief Resident at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He was a former Biden Administration appointee serving as an advisor in the Office of the Vice President under Kamala Harris as an appointed White House Fellow. He served as a former Health Policy Aide to Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont and Congressman Raul Ruiz of California. He leverages his background in politics, policy, and the field of behavioral economics to use healthcare settings as a place to build programs that serve the needs of vulnerable patients.

He is the founder of Vot-ER, a nonpartisan voter registration organization that has organized over 26,000 healthcare providers and 300 hospitals to help non-urgent patients register to vote. He is the founder of Get Waivered, a program that is converting our nation’s ERs into the front door for opioid addiction treatment and was instrumental in the organizing efforts resulting in the removal of the X waiver provision. He also co-founded GOTVax, an initiative aimed at leveraging a get out the vote framework to deliver vaccines directly to vulnerable communities via hyper-targeted vaccine pop up clinics. He currently serves as CEO of A Healthier Democracy, a nonprofit healthcare organizing incubator which leverages healthcare workers and healthcare settings as a place to build programs and movements that serve the needs of vulnerable patients.

Alister’s work has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, British Medical Journal, and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post, BBC, and Scientific American. Alister earned his MD from Harvard Medical School as a Presidential Scholar, his Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School as a fellow in the Center for Public Leadership, and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Rutgers University where he was a Division 1 tennis player.