Nathan Delafield, M.D., is a Senior Associate Consultant in Community Internal Medicine, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, and an Associate Program Director for the Internal Medicine residency program at Mayo Clinic Arizona. Dr. Delafield is also the Associate Chair of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging for the Department of Medicine. Dr. Delafield attended medical school at Indiana University and an internal medicine residency at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Dr. Delafield is passionate about medical education, advocacy, philanthropy, and community engagement. He is a health equity researcher exploring new solutions to help communities better address social determinants of health and reduce healthcare disparities

Chris was born and raised in the Seattle, Washington. He grew up working in his grandmother’s Chinese restaurant, waiting tables and delivering food. He completed his undergraduate at Santa Clara University with a major in Finance and minor in Economics. He then worked at Bloomberg as an Equity Advanced Specialist. Inspired by work that he did with a health technology startup in London which connected older patients with chronic conditions remotely to their doctors, he decided to shift gears and attend medical school and was highly recruited to our school.

Prior to medical school, he shadowed in the emergency department at Evergreen Hospital and Medical Center — and he continued this interest throughout medical school. He was the Mayo Clinic delegate on the Arizona Emergency Medicine Medical Student Council (AZMSC) and was co-president of the Emergency Medicine Interest Group at our school. He matched for his residency in Emergency Medicine at Stanford in Palo Alto, California.

Selected by his fellow students to be this year’s graduation speaker, it is no surprise that he has been a leader and a unifying member of his class. During medical school he organized students for vaccination drives during the COVID pandemic, served on our admission committee, was a teaching assistant and member of our preclinical curriculum committee. He was part of a group of students who helped us improve our virtual learning during the pandemic and has also been a leader of wellness activities in our school. Chris aims to build upon his business background in the future in leadership and administrative roles in the field of Emergency Medicine, with aspirations to affect positive change on economic and financial practices in medicine for the sake of improving patient