Dr. Devika Bhushan is a pediatrician and public health leader specializing in health innovation, trauma-informed systems, stress and resilience, and gender and health equity. She is a nationally recognized voice in mental health and population health, with a focus on building equitable systems of care that support both prevention and recovery. She currently serves as Chief Medical Officer at Daybreak Health.

Dr. Bhushan previously served as Acting Surgeon General of California, where she led statewide efforts to advance mental health, health equity, and resilience-focused public health strategy, and co-launched the $500 million ACEs Aware initiative to address childhood adversity and toxic stress. She currently serves on the national Board of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and as an adjunct faculty member at Stanford University, where she contributes to teaching and research at the intersection of health systems, equity, and innovation.

Her work spans clinical medicine, public health leadership, and systems transformation, with a particular focus on how stress, trauma, and social determinants of health shape outcomes across populations. An award-winning mental health advocate, she lives openly with bipolar disorder and has spoken and written publicly about her own diagnosis — including as a sitting Acting Surgeon General — helping to reduce stigma and expand public understanding of mental illness from a physician and policymaker perspective.

Dr. Bhushan earned her MD at Harvard Medical School and completed her pediatrics residency at Johns Hopkins. She is an immigrant, a first-generation Indian American, and a parent, and brings a deeply personal and systems-level perspective to her work in health equity and mental health.