Dr. Thea L. James is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and serves as the associate chief medical officer, vice president of mission, and director of the Violence Intervention Advocacy Program (VIAP) at Boston Medical Center.Dr. James has chaired and served on national committees within the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), including the SAEM Women in Academic Emergency Medicine Task Force. She is a member of the Boston University School of Medicine Admissions Committee, and in 2009 was appointed to the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, where she presently serves as chair of the Licensing Committee. Dr. James is the 2008 recipient of the David. H. Mulligan Award for public service, and has given numerous public lectures and talks.Dr. James' passion is in public health both domestically and globally. She is a supervising medical officer on the Boston Disaster Medical Assistance Team, under the Department of Health and Human Services, which has responded to several disasters in the United States and across the globe. She has deployed to post-9/11 in New York City, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, Bam, Iran after the earthquake in 2003, and Port-Au-Prince, Haiti after the earthquake of 2010. Dr. James has also traveled to Haiti with colleagues and emergency medicine residents for the past twelve years.A graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine, James completed an emergency medicine residency at Boston City Hospital, where she was a chief resident.