Jacob DeWees is an Instructor of Emergency Medicine at OHSU School of Medicine and a pediatric nurse practitioner in the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital pediatric emergency department, where he cares for children of all ages presenting with acute illness and injury. He is board-certified in both pediatric acute care and pediatric primary care.

His path into pediatric emergency medicine began in pre-hospital care. He served as a firefighter and emergency medical technician with El Dorado County Fire Protection District in California, then worked as a paramedic in Northern California’s 911 and inter-facility transport systems. After several years caring for patients in the field, he moved into pediatric emergency care as a department technician at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital while completing his undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

He earned his Master of Science in Nursing from the University of California, San Francisco, completing clinical training across the UCSF, Stanford, and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital pediatric programs. He began his advanced practice career as a pediatric orthopedic nurse practitioner at Stanford Children’s Health, caring for children with acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions. He joined the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital pediatric emergency department in 2023 and earned his Doctor of Nursing Practice from OHSU in 2025, completing the acute care pediatric nurse practitioner track with rotational training in the pediatric intensive care unit.

His clinical approach centers on careful diagnostic reasoning under uncertainty, particularly for the undifferentiated presentations that fill a pediatric emergency department. He uses shared decision-making when the evidence permits multiple reasonable paths and the family’s values matter to the choice; in other situations, he focuses on making sure families understand the reasoning behind the recommended plan. As a parent himself, he is conscious of what it means to bring a child to the emergency department. His current research examines serious bacterial infection in hypothermic young infants, with the goal of refining how clinicians identify the small subset of infants who require full evaluation rather than reassurance.

Outside of clinical work, he is a husband and father of three young children. He and his wife, also an advanced practice provider, live in Portland.