2024 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit

Dr. Elizabeth Baca is a Specialist Leader at Deloitte providing systems thinking and insights to health care and life science clients to support care delivery innovation and research to foster total health and well-being.

She served in both administrations of Governor Brown and Governor Newsom, first as Senior Health Advisor and then Deputy Director in the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research for California. She has worked on a variety of projects to foster health through land use planning, systems change, food systems, precision health, precision medicine and big data.  Much of her work is about connecting the dots; she loves working across sectors to foster participant-centered design and collaboration.  A significant part of her work is aligning win-wins for projects that offer co-benefits particularly in addressing the social, economic, and environmental factors that impact health. As an example, she has done work to improve health through climate mitigation and adaptation projects. In her role with California, she has provided leadership and guidance to several initiatives including The California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, the Global Climate Action Summit, and the California Health Care Climate Alliance.

Dr. Baca has served in several national and global advisory roles including with the Urban Land Institutes Health Leaders Program, an advisor to FoodSystem6, a food system accelerator, and as a contributor and member of the Biotech Futures Council for the World Economic Forum. She has been a contributing author on several publications including the National Academy of Sciences (formally Institute of Medicine) Consensus Committee for Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity, Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Health Care, and Precision Medicine: An Action Plan for California.

Previously, she served on the General Pediatric Faculty at Stanford Medical School and directed the Community Pediatric and Child Advocacy Rotation.

Dr. Baca studied health policy at Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela. She completed her Masters in Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and her Doctorate of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Baca completed her residency in the Pediatric Leadership for the Underserved (PLUS) program at University of California, San Francisco.