Thea James, MD, MBA

Affiliation: Vice President of Mission and Associate Chief Medical Officer, Boston Medical Center
Current term: Sep. 2023 - Aug. 2026
Board member since: 2020

Thea James, MD, is Vice President of Mission and Associate Chief Medical Officer at Boston Medical Center, and an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Boston Medical Center/Boston University School of Medicine. She also serves as the Associate Chief Medical Officer, Vice President of Mission, and Director of the Violence Intervention Advocacy Program (VIAP) at Boston Medical Center. Thea is a founding member of the National Network of Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Advocacy Programs (NNHVIP). In 2011 she was appointed to Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence.

As Vice President of Mission, Thea works with caregivers throughout BMC. Additionally, she has primary responsibility for coordinating and maximizing BMC’s relationships and strategic alliances with a wide range of local, state, and national organizations including community agencies, housing advocates, and others that partner with BMC to meet the full spectrum of patients’ needs. The goal is to foster innovative and effective new models of care that are essential for patients and communities to thrive. Integrating upstream interventions into BMC’s clinical care models are critical to achieving equity and health in the broadest sense.

Thea has chaired and served on national committees within the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), served as a moderator, and has given public lectures and talks. She was appointed to the SAEM Women in Academic Emergency Medicine Task Force, is a member of the Boston University School of Medicine Admissions Committee, and in 2009, Thea was appointed to the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, where she presently serves as Chair of the Licensing Committee. She is the 2008 awardee of the Boston Public Health Commission’s Mulligan Award for public service, and a 2012 recipient of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Role Model Award. She received The Boston Business Journal Healthcare Hero award in 2012 & 2015. She was 2014 recipient of the Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Award. The Boston Chamber of Commerce awarded Thea with the Pinnacle Award in 2015, which honors women in business and the professions.

Thea’s passion is in public health, both domestically and globally. She is a Supervising Medical Officer on the Boston Disaster Medical Assistance Team (MA-1 DMAT), under the Department of Health and Human Services. She has deployed to post 9/11 in NYC, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, Bam, Iran after the 2003 earthquake, and Port-Au-Prince, Haiti after the earthquake of 2010. Thea travelled to Haiti with MA-1 DMAT one day after the 2010 earthquake.

A graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine, Thea trained in Emergency Medicine at Boston City Hospital, where she was a chief resident.