Dr. Shereef Elnahal commenced his tenure as 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.

Prior to OHSU, he was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden to serve as Under Secretary for Health at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and confirmed by the United States Senate on July 21, 2022, with a bipartisan vote. In this role, 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.

Dr. Elnahal oversaw the Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA) implementation of the Sergeant First Class (SFC) Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, the largest expansion of veteran benefits and care in a generation. More than two years since the law, VA has enrolled more than 800,000 new veterans into health care, and upgraded health care coverage for more than 900,000 veterans already enrolled in VA.

Despite this large increase in demand, he has also improved access to care by growing appointment volumes, expanding infrastructure through innovative partnerships with top medical institutions and the Department of Defense, and more. VHA is now better staffed with clinicians than at any point in its history after he initiated systemwide hiring and retention initiatives, which also helped reduce average new patient wait times for primary care and mental health.

VHA grew care delivery in all services under his leadership, and improved overall care productivity by 9% in two years. He has also advanced 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. For the first time in VA history, he also made policy that allowed clinicians in VHA to offer abortion counseling and services to pregnant veterans with threats to their life and health.

Dr. Elnahal also focused on ending the scourge of veteran suicide, implementing a new policy in which VA covers the costs of care for any veteran in suicidal crisis (not just those enrolled for VA health care), and advanced VA’s research in psychedelic-assisted therapy for the first time since the 1960s. The latter has gained bipartisan support in Congress, with bills that support multisite clinical trials on MDMA, psilocybin and other psychedelic agents combined with novel models of psychotherapy.

Under Dr. Elnahal’s leadership, VA also made progress in placing record numbers of homeless veterans into permanent housing. In 2024, VA housed nearly 48,000 homeless veterans, leading to a 7.5% reduction in veteran homelessness since 2023. Veteran homelessness is now at the lowest level since measurement began in 2009.

VA is also the largest academic health system in the nation, training over 122,000 health professions trainees across more than 60 clinical disciplines, including medicine, nursing, psychology, pharmacy and physical therapy. VA is also affiliated with 95% of medical schools and academic health systems in America, including OHSU, with more than 1,800 affiliations with health professions schools of all types. In this capacity, Dr. Elnahal served on the National Academy of Medicine’s Leadership Consortium.

Prior to 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 the hospital served as a model for urban and regional response efforts.

In addition, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy tasked the hospital with coordinating regional pandemic response efforts across dozens of hospitals in northern New Jersey, as well as with activating a military field hospital alongside the National Guard. In addition to his leadership during the pandemic, Dr. Elnahal oversaw substantial improvements in care quality and patient safety at the hospital, leading to improvements against national benchmarks.

Dr. Elnahal also turned around University Hospital financially, from a starting point with significant operating losses. Due in part to the turnaround under his tenure, Fitch recently upgraded University Hospital's Issuer Default Rating (IDR) and revenue bond rating to BBB+ from BB-. The upgrade reflected the hospital's strengthened financial position, including improved liquidity and better revenue cycle management.

Underpinning this turnaround was Dr. Elnahal’s work to regain the trust of the hospital’s staff and community. He established new and fair contracts with the hospital’s seven unions. He also engaged the community meaningfully in the hospital’s programming, to include a partnership with the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Financing Authority to provide supportive housing to homeless patients; a hospital-based violence intervention program that has served as a national model; and a program that deploys trusted chaplains to serve as community health workers.

Prior to his time at University Hospital, Elnahal served as New Jersey’s 21st Health Commissioner, appointed to the state Cabinet post by Gov. Phil Murphy and confirmed unanimously by the New Jersey Senate. As Health Commissioner, he was responsible for running the state’s four psychiatric hospitals, and made strides in improving quality, patient safety and outcomes for New Jersey’s most vulnerable patients requiring mental health inpatient hospitalization. He also expanded the New Jersey Health Information Network, worked to improve infant and maternal health outcomes, and made strides in curbing the opioid epidemic.

Dr. Elnahal also served as Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Quality, Safety, and Value at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs from 2016 through 2018, overseeing quality of care for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). He co-founded the VHA Innovation Ecosystem, a program that continues to foster the spread of innovation and best practices that improve veteran care across the nation.

Dr. Elnahal received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his M.B.A. with Distinction from Harvard Business School. He was also appointed by President Barack Obama to the 2015-16 class of White House Fellows. 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.