Dr. Shereef Elnahal became OHSU’s sixth president on Aug. 11, 2025. He is a leader and expert in health care delivery in large, integrated health systems, with a career focused on serving vulnerable communities.

Before joining OHSU, he was appointed by President Joe Biden to serve as Under Secretary for Health at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He led the largest integrated health system in the nation alongside a team of nearly 400,000 professionals, delivering world-class care to 9 million enrolled veterans. Accomplishments include:

• Overseeing the largest expansion of veteran benefits and care in a generation, enrolling more than 800,000 new veterans into health care, and upgrading coverage for more than 900,000 veterans.
• Improving overall care productivity by 9% in two years.
• Advancing care access for women veterans, including extending maternity care coordination benefits for up to one year after birth for veteran mothers to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality risks, and enrolling more than 50,000 new women veterans into health care over the last year.
• Implementing a new policy in which the VA covers the costs of care for any veteran in suicidal crisis.
• Placing record numbers of homeless veterans into permanent housing.

Before his role at VA, Dr. Elnahal served as President and Chief Executive Officer of University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey. University Hospital is a Level I trauma center, the principal academic medical center for Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, and New Jersey’s only public hospital. Dr. Elnahal led University Hospital through the COVID-19 public health emergency and turned around the hospital’s finances.

Before that, he served as New Jersey’s 21st Health Commissioner, responsible for running the state’s four psychiatric hospitals. He made strides in improving quality, patient safety and outcomes for New Jersey’s most vulnerable patients requiring mental health inpatient hospitalization.

Dr. Elnahal received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his M.B.A. with Distinction from Harvard Business School. His perspective on the American health care system’s COVID-19 response, including on matters of health equity, has been featured on national media outlets including CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and Fox Business Network.