Deputy Commissioner, Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness (CHECW)
Inaugural Chief Medical Officer, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYCDOHMH)
Dr. Michelle Morse serves as the Deputy Commissioner for the Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness (CHECW) and inaugural Chief Medical Officer at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYCDOHMH). Dr. Morse is responsible for leading the agency’s work in bridging public health and health care to reduce health inequities, guiding CHECW’s place-based and cross-cutting health equity programs, and serving as a key liaison to clinicians and clinical leaders across New York City.
Dr. Morse is an internal medicine and public health doctor who works to achieve health equity through global solidarity, social medicine and anti-racism education, and activism. She is a general internal medicine physician, part-time hospitalist at Kings County Hospital, Co-Founder of EqualHealth, and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School.
EqualHealth builds critical consciousness and collective action globally, in the pursuit of health equity for all. In 2015 Dr. Morse worked with several EqualHealth partners to found the Social Medicine Consortium (SMC), a global coalition which uses activism and disruptive pedagogy rooted in social medicine to advance health justice. She served as Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Partners In Health (PIH) from 2013 to 2016 and now serves on the Board of Directors of PIH. In 2018, Dr. Morse was awarded a Soros Equality Fellowship to launch EqualHealth and the SMC’s global Campaign Against Racism. From September 2019 to January 2021, she served as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy fellow in Washington, DC and worked with the Ways and Means Committee, Majority Staff, in the U.S. House of Representatives.
