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Effective April 1, 2021 Glenn Flores, M.D., FAAP, director of the Health Services Research Institute at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and professor of pediatrics at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, has been named chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
 
Dr. Flores will also serve as senior associate dean for child health, the George E. Batchelor Endowed Chair in Child Health, and physician-in-chief at Holtz Children’s Hospital at UM/Jackson Memorial Medical Center.
 
A career focused extensively on disparities in health care caused by poverty, racism, and lack of access for underserved populations has led Dr. Flores very naturally to South Florida. As he says, “For me it’s the ultimate gift to be able to care for children and to improve their lives and well-being through clinical care, research, teaching, advocacy, and ensuring that we provide equitable care to all children.” 
 
After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College, Dr. Flores received his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, followed by a residency in pediatrics at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University School of Medicine.
 
He has served in leadership positions in pediatrics at Boston Medical Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and as distinguished chair of health policy research at the Medical Research Institute in Minneapolis and as a research affiliate at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. 
“Dr. Flores will be an extraordinary leader for our Department of Pediatrics’ mission to serve the children and families of South Florida and beyond,” said Henri R. Ford, M.D., M.H.A., dean and chief academic officer of the Miller School of Medicine. “Our faculty has long worked to improve these families’ access to our high-quality care – at Holtz Children’s Hospital, in our facilities including the groundbreaking Pediatric Mobile Clinic, and at community health fairs – and to advocate for child health at the local, state, and federal level.”
 
Dr. Flores is a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program and the editorial board of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. He is director of the Academic Pediatric Association’s Research in Academic Pediatrics Initiative on Diversity (RAPID), funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
 
Dr. Flores has received many awards for his research and advocacy at the national level, and his more than 240 publications address a wide range of research and policy issues, including racial and ethnic disparities in children’s health and health care, health policy, insuring the uninsured, health services research, population health, language barriers in health care, and childhood obesity. Based on his pioneering work on parent mentors, he drafted federal legislation that became law in 2018 and provides $120 million in Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services grants to states to leverage parent mentors to insure uninsured children.
 
Dr. Flores, who begins his new position on April 1, 2021, succeeds Judy Schaechter, M.D., M.B.A., as chair of pediatrics. Dr. Schaechter was named a 2020-21 Health Policy Fellow by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Academy of Medicine.