Bio

Pooja Neiman is a Trauma and Acute Care Surgeon and an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. She completed her Acute Care and Surgical Critical Care fellowships at UCSF in San Francisco, CA in 2026 and her General Surgery residency at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA in 2024. She was a National Clinician Scholars Program (NCSP) Fellow at the University of Michigan from 2020-2022, where her work focused on the clinical and financial outcomes for surgical patients after health policy changes. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she also volunteered with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Testing Team to bring K-12 students in the state safely back to school.

Prior to surgical residency, she completed her medical education at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and received her Master's in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. While in college, Pooja launched a non-profit called Mobilizing Health, an organization that partnered with physicians and community leaders to deliver medical advice via text message to more than 5,000 patients in rural India. After running Mobilizing Health full-time and overseeing its transition to UNICEF, she focused on issues related to access to health care domestically.

Having grown up in a family that incurred medical debt while uninsured and later gained coverage through the Affordable Care Act, she knows firsthand how much consistent access to care can change a family's life. Pooja believes that access to high-value, affordable health care is a basic need, and that trauma systems, which care for every injured patient regardless of insurance or ability to pay, are a cornerstone of that access. Her research examines how insurance, financial hardship, and the social conditions of patients' lives shape their recovery after injury and emergency surgery, with the goal of informing policies that help patients not only survive but fully recover.