Healthcare Advocates: Lash Nolen and Alister Martin

LaShyra “Lash” Nolen is a Harvard Medical School student where she is serving as student council president of her class. She is the first documented black woman to hold this leadership position. She is a published author and fervent advocate for social justice with commentary published in the Boston Globe, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, and HuffPost. Lash is a Foster Scholar in Health Policy, Advocacy, and Media at the MGH Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation and a co-host for the Clinical Problem Solvers Anti-Racism in Medicine podcast. Most recently she founded https://www.wegotusproject.org/, a grassroots community empowerment project with the goal of bringing vaccine education and access to Black communities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work has earned her the honor of becoming the 2020 National Minority Quality Forum’s youngest “40 under 40 Leader in Minority Health”, named a “2020 Young Futurist” by The Root Magazine, and the 2021 recipient of the American Medical Student Association's Racial Justice in Medicine Award.  Follow Lash on Twitter @LashNolen

Alister Martin MD MPP is faculty at the MGH Center for Social Justice and Health Equity  at Harvard  Medical School and Founder of Get Waivered, a campaign aimed at transforming emergency departments nationwide into the front door for recovery for patients with opioid addiction. This work serves as a  national model at the NIH with several state partnerships including Get Waivered Texas and Get Waivered Nebraska. Alister trained at Harvard after working in state health policy and after getting an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School  of Government where he was a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership. In 2013, he accepted a position  as a Health Policy Aide to Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont given that state's ongoing transition to a single payer system at the time. Over the subsequent year, he led a team in the Governor’s office responsible for building the communications plan for Vermont’s proposed single payer plan called Green Mountain Care.  Alister previously served as Chief Resident at MGH/Brigham Hospital. He now leverages his background in politics, healthcare policy, and the field of behavioral economics to use the ED as a place to build programs that serve the needs of vulnerable patients. He leads a program which offers patients who are unregistered voters the opportunity to register to vote through a program called VotER.  Follow Alister on Twitter @AlisterFMartin