Safia Rubaii works as an IHS emergency physician at Gallup Indian Medical Center, in Gallup, NM. Born in Iowa, she has lived mostly in Florida, Colorado, and New Mexico. She started working in healthcare as a nursing home “kitchen girl,” then as a nurse’s aide, before completing nursing school at the University of South Florida. She worked as an RN in a variety of settings (education, urban and rural emergency, ICU, and OB at a large urban hospital; migrant health; and as a Boulder Community Hospital eye health volunteer in Mante, Mexico). She attended medical school at the University of Colorado, with electives in tropical medicine/infectious disease at Cayetano Heredia in Peru and in Costa Rica (LSU). She completed her internal medicine internship in Colorado, and her emergency medicine residency at the University of Florida. After working briefly at the Yukon Kuskokwim Hospital in Bethel, Alaska, she worked at the Navajo hospital in Tuba City and in rural Colorado before coming to Gallup Indian Medical Center. She completed the DTM&H program at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Besides under-served and native health care, compassion in healthcare, and the change process; she is passionate about languages, and has an MA in Linguistics from the University of South Florida. She loves to learn, hike, back-country ski, cycling, dance, and study Classical Literary Tibetan and the arts, especially ceramics. Safia was a fellow at Gallup Indian Medical Center in Gallup, New Mexico.