Dr. Vanessa Grubbs

Physician. Writer. Activist.

I'm a country girl from Spring Lake, North Carolina, youngest of six and the first college graduate and physician in my family. As a naive high school junior deciding to become a doctor, I had no idea the twists and turns my career would take.

I received my undergraduate and medical degrees from Duke University. After my primary care internal medicine residency at Highland Hospital of Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, California, I stayed on as faculty but was soon bitten by the “research bug” and decided to leave Highland for the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) general medicine research fellowship, but not before meeting the man I would marry a year later—a few months after giving him my left kidney in 2005.

The experience of becoming a kidney donor led me to continue my training in nephrology. I completed the UCSF general medicine research fellowship in 2006 and the UCSF nephrology fellowship in 2009, then joined the nephrology faculty as Assistant Professor at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017.

Witnessing disturbing realities in nephrology in general and kidney failure specifically, ultimately drew me to palliative care and extended my writing from research to creative. I’ve written and spoken in international forums on palliative care in nephrology.  I am among the 2017 cohort for the Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar Leadership Program and the 2018 cohort of the California Health Care Foundation’s Health Care Leadership Program.

But as a result of my desire to focus on my writing and a series of “microaggressions,” I quit my clinical research day job in 2019. I soon learned many other Black physicians were enduring much more devastating racism, so I founded Black Doc Village, Inc—a non-profit organization dedicated to putting an end to a system that disproportionately and inequitably dismisses Black doctors.

HUNDREDS OF INTERLACED FINGERS is my first book and I’m working on my second. I live with my husband, and our two “pittie” puppies in Oakland, California.

BOOKing

If you would like to book me for an event, please send me a note. Thank you for your interest.
— Dr. Vanessa Grubbs