Janis Tupesis, MD

LEADERSHIP POSITIONS HELD

Associate Director, UW-Madison Global Health Institute
Faculty Co-Advisor, UW International COVID-19 Engagement

Publications UW Experts Database

EDUCATION

Undergraduate: George Mason University
Medical School: University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health
Residency: University of Chicago – Chief Resident

Dr. Tupesis completed his residency training at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics where he served as the Associate Residency Program Director, a position he held until joining the Emergency Medicine faculty at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He served as the Department of Emergency Medicine’s Residency Program Director until 2014, overseeing the program’s initial accreditation and expansion to its current form. At the same, he served as the chairperson of UW Health’s Graduate Medical Education Global Health Committee and one of the Associate Directors of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, positions he continues to hold today.

He is involved in projects involving establishing graduate medical education programs in resource limited settings in both Liberia, Ethiopia and South Africa – partnering with multiple other academic institutions. In 2018, he begun work with the World Bank and the Association of African Universities on the Africa Centers of Excellence for Development (ACE Impact) Project, which aims to improve the quality, quantity and development impact of postgraduate education in selected universities through regional specialization and collaboration.

Since 2015, he has been working as a volunteer technical consultant at the Emergency, Trauma and Acute Care Programme within the Department for Management of Noncommunicable Diseases, Disability, Violence and Injury Prevention at the World Health Organization. He continues to work as one of the founding faculty members of the newly formed Academic Consortium for Emergency Systems (ACES), a consortium of academic global health programs to support the work of aforementioned WHO Programme.

He serves on multiple international global health education committees, including on the Board of Directors for the International Federation for Emergency Medicine (IFEM), and with the African Federation for Emergency Medicine (AFEM), American College of Emergency Medicine (ACEP) and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s Global Emergency Medicine Academy (GEMA), and he is a Fellow in the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine with the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. In 2018, he was awarded the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award by GEMA for his work on emergency care health and education systems development.

Dr. Tupesis is also the Faculty Co-Advisor for UW–Madison’s engagement with the UNDP, Engineers Without Borders, and other partners focusing on facilitating capacity building and systems strengthening work around COVID-19 response in low and middle-income countries. As faculty co-advisor, Dr. Tupesis is responsible for co-chairing a working group of UW faculty, staff, students, and other partners and coordinating engagement with various partner organizations.

Dr. Tupesis’ outside interests include travel, adventure medicine and mountaineering, UW athletics, and spending time with his wife and children.

RECENT PRESENTATIONS

• “Professional Organizations in Emergency Medicine: The Role in Further Global Development,” Emirates Society of Emergency Medicine Conference (Dec. 2022)
• “COVID in the United States: Health System Implications from Three Years on the Front Line,” Latvian Physicians Association Academic Assembly (Sept. 2022)
• “The discipline of Emergency medicine and the Republic of Latvia’s progress towards world’s best standards,” Latvian Physicians Association Academic Assembly (Sept. 2022)
• “Global Health Development Priorities in Emergency Medicine Professional Organizations,” Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (May 2022)
• “Taking it Global: The Changing Paradigm of Post Graduate Training in Academic Global Health,” Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (May 2022)