Harrison Alter, MS, MD

Harrison Alter, MD, MS, FACEP retired in January, 2021 as Interim Medical Director of Alameda County Health Care for the Homeless, and then restarted that same position in December, 2024. He was previously Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Alameda Health System, and an attending physician in the emergency department at AHS-Highland Hospital for 25 years. He is a (Volunteer) Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine, Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Alter is Founding Director and Director of Research of the Andrew Levitt Center for Social Emergency Medicine (levittcenter.org), a nonprofit research and advocacy institute devoted to integrating social context into the structure and practice of emergency care. Earlier in his career, Dr. Alter was on the emergency medicine faculty at the University of Washington and its Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, and served also for several years as an emergency physician for the Navajo Nation in Tuba City, AZ. Dr. Alter received his medical degree from UCSF, his Master’s in Health and Medical Sciences from UC Berkeley, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Washington. He is a graduate of Brown University, with a concentration in Comparative Literature. Dr. Alter serves on the boards of the Levitt Center, Insight Housing (insighthousing.org), and until recently, Cardea Health (cardeahealth.org), where he was board chair. He is a family man, an avid reader, skier and cyclist, and is active in community theater.