Jonathan Bressler, MD, MPH

I grew up playing hockey in the Chicago suburbs, and skiing and canoeing in Wisconsin. I fled the burbs after high school, and I’ve been on the loose ever since.

In college at the University of Illinois, I studied Creative Writing, thinking I’d be a songwriter or poet, and double-majored in Biology as a back-up plan. After graduation, my friends all took boring jobs in cubicles, so I joined Peace Corps and went to Burkina Faso, in West Africa, to teach math and science in a village middle school for two years. I returned home, bewildered by a scrambled worldview that gave way to anguish about health inequity, and headed to Emory University for an MPH in Epidemiology. My studies returned me to West Africa to work on elimination of trachoma in Guinea, which was disrupted by the Ebola epidemic there.

After grad school, I accepted an opportunity with the Alaska Department of Health. For six years, I worked on various environmental health topics, such as the water and sanitation need of Alaskan villages and childhood lead poisoning prevention. I also met physicians whose breadth of practice amazed me. They reminded me of the skilled clinicians I’d met abroad: far from large institutions, managing whatever came through the clinic doors—births, fractures, emergencies, or the usual checkups—and played pivotal roles in public health.

In Alaska, I fell in love—I met my wife, another recent public health grad—and rekindled a zeal for pond hockey. I joined Anchorage Nordic Ski Patrol and became enthralled by the backcountry, and later signed on with Denali Ski Patrol at Arctic Valley. This awoke a desire for more clinical skills and, along with a restlessness from working at a desk, led me to medical school. I attended a rural-focused satellite campus of Medical College of Wisconsin in Wausau, where I continued to ski patrol and devoted time to supporting the health needs of refugees.

My wife and I are thrilled to come home to Alaska with our toddler daughter. When we aren’t working, you might see us with her strapped to one of our backs in the front range or kicking-and-gliding the trails at Kincaid.