Richard Pan

Richard Pan is a pediatrician, educator, health services researcher, and former State Senator and Assemblymember representing the Sacramento region. He is a volunteer physician at the Sacramento County Primary Care Clinic caring for Medi-Cal and uninsured children and youth. In the California Legislature, he served respectively as chair of the Senate and Assembly Committees on Health; in addition, he was chair of the Asian American Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus. He led California’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act and advocated for legislation to increase vaccination rates, expand newborn screening, prevent sexually transmitted diseases, enable gun violence research, and improve pandemic preparedness. Before his governmental work, he was a professor at the University of California, Davis, and Director of the Pediatric Residency Program, where he created Communities and Health Professionals Together, a nationally recognized service-learning curriculum. He was co-founder and chair of Healthy Kids, Healthy Future, securing health coverage for over 65,000 California children, and he created the Sacramento County Health Authority to provide local oversight of Medi-Cal plans. He received the Physician Humanitarian Award from Medical Board of California and the Beverlee A. Myers Award for outstanding leadership and accomplishments in public health from the California Department of Public Health. He has a BA in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University, an MD from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MPH from Harvard University.