Victoria Lewis, MD, MSW, MPP

Victoria Lewis was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in cities throughout Los Angeles County, California. She attended UC Berkeley for undergrad where she majored in Public Health with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice. During her time at UC Berkeley, Victoria volunteered for three years at the Berkeley Free Clinic providing health and social service referrals and medical services to underserved populations. It was also at Berkeley where she discovered her passion for community-based participatory research. Victoria was thrilled to continue partnering with marginalized communities as part of the Program in Medical Education Leadership and Advocacy (PRIME-LA) at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. After her third year in medical school, Victoria pursued a dual Master of Public Policy and Master of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. While at Luskin, she worked as a youth and adult substance use treatment counselor, served on Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti's Education Team in the Office of Economic Opportunity, and collaborated with the Drug Policy Alliance to identify barriers to buprenorphine among justice-involved populations in Los Angeles. Victoria has also been actively engaged in research, working on projects to improve mental health services for individuals with severe mental illness, increase resiliency among LGBTQ+ youth with depression, and enhance community-campus partnerships to better meet community needs. As the first physician in her family, Victoria is humbled to be joining the Solnit Integrated Training Program. She is passionate about improving the health of LGBTQ+ and systems-involved youth with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders through research, clinical practice, and policy advocacy and she strives to end reliance on the criminal justice system as an entry point to care. After completing the program, she hopes to pursue an Addiction Psychiatry fellowship. In her free time, Victoria enjoys exploring new restaurants and coffee shops, listening to music, reading, writing, tending to house plants, and learning Spanish to connect with her family in Argentina.