Jessica Isom, MD, MPH
Consultant & Science Advisory Board, Virgin Pulse
Jessica Isom, MD, MPH, is a board-certified community psychiatrist and clinical Instructor in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. She primarily works in Boston as an attending psychiatrist at Codman Square Health Center and with Boston Medical Center’s Psychiatry Emergency Services. She received her MD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also received her MPH with a focus on public health leadership.
She currently serves as a member of the American Psychiatric Association Assembly representing Early Career Psychiatrists, where her contributions center on illuminating the need for health equity in organized psychiatry. She has also been elected to the Councilor Position for the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society where her focus on social justice and health equity provides an opportunity to improve the care provided to marginalized populations in the state. She continues to work with the Yale Department of Psychiatry residency program as a faculty track consultant leader for the Social Justice and Health Equity Curriculum.
Her professional interests include working toward eradicating racial and ethnic mental health disparities, mitigating the impact of implicit racial bias on clinical care, and the use of a community focused population health approach in psychiatric practice. Her anti-racism teaching highlights the history of medical racism, interpersonal challenges in interracial interactions and provides a language for naming and responding to racism at multiple levels. She currently is working as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consultant and facilitator for individuals, non-profit organizations and private companies