Dr. Schweitzer is a current Master of Public Health in Health Policy student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. She is part of the Harvard Public Health Leadership Concentration and is a Horace W. Goldsmith Scholarship Fellow.
An inaugural Health Systems Innovation Fellow at the Global Surgery Foundation and the Health Systems Innovation Lab at Harvard University, Dr. Schweitzer studies innovative global health systems financing mechanisms and how best practices can be leveraged to design novel funding mechanisms in the emerging space of global surgery.
Dr. Schweitzer is also a General Surgery Resident Physician (Post-Graduate Year 4) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She has completed the Graduate Certificate in Global Surgical Care through the University of British Columbia. Her surgical interests are in Trauma and Acute Care General Surgery, and she aspires to include global surgical practice and surgical systems development in her professional work.
She is a researcher in trauma, acute and thyroid surgery, as well as methods to improve equity, diversity, and inclusion in resident recruitment. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Surgery.
Dr. Schweitzer was a member of the Board of Directors of Resident Doctors of Canada from June 2021 to December 2022 and continues to represent residents on Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada committees.
A Gates Cambridge Scholar, Dr. Schweitzer completed a Master of Philosophy in Biological Science specializing in immunology and infectious disease laboratory research at the University of Cambridge and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the United Kingdom.
She completed her MD at the University of Calgary, where she spent a year of her practical training working in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories in the Canadian North and in remote fly-in communities in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. During this time, she was the Vice President of Communications of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students. She is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Calgary Guide to Understanding Disease. Dr. Schweitzer was a TEDMED Research Scholar in 2018 and was named one of the “17 in 2017: 17 physicians who helped shape the future of healthcare in 2017” by the Canadian Medical Association.
Dr. Schweitzer holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, specializing in Biochemical and Biomedical Engineering. During her undergraduate degree, she studied for a year at the École Supérieure de Chimie Physique Électronique de Lyon in France.
Outside of medicine, Dr. Schweitzer worked as a Healthcare Analyst in London, United Kingdom, consulting with pharmaceutical companies on biologic drug development market opportunities and strategy.
In her spare time, she loves to hike, cross-country ski, and play ice hockey.