Indian Medical Health Director
to Discuss Experiences of A Tribal
Doctor at UCSD Native American Celebration

October 22, 2008

By Jan Jennings

Pathways to Life: Experiences of a Tribal Doctor will be addressed when Dan Calac, M.D., medical director of the Indian Health Council, Inc., (IHC) speaks Nov. 7 at the University of California, San Diego.

Part of UC San Diego’s 2008 California Native American Day Celebration, the event will be from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Comunidad Room of the Cross-Cultural Center. It is free and open to the public.

Born and raised on the Pauma Indian Reservation, since 2003 Calac has served as medical director of IHC, a consortium of nine tribes dedicated to the continual betterment of Indian health, wholeness, and well-being. IHC has a main facility adjacent to the Rincon reservation in Pauma Valley and the Santa Ysabel Community Health Center located on the Santa Ysabel Reservation.

Under Calac’s direction, IHC provides on-site and outreach services and programs to the North San Diego County reservations of Inaja-Cosmit, La Jolla, Los Coyotes, Mesa Grande, Pala, Pauma, Rincon, San Pasqual, and Santa Ysabel. These services range from prenatal to geriatric; from child and adult fitness and diabetes clinics to substance abuse prevention and domestic violence programs, and from mammograms and eye clinics to outreach health fairs and environmental health services.

Calac began his quest to a pathway in medicine as a tribal doctor with a degree in biology from San Diego State University. He went on to receive his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and did both internship and residency in combined internal medicine and pediatrics at UCLA.

Calac is a member of the American Medical Society and a member and scholar of the Massachusetts Medical Society. He was an Arthur Ashe Foundation Fellow at Harvard AIDS Institute, and has received an Indian Health Service scholarship and a Community Service Award. He served as a co-principle investigator for the Preventing Underage Drinking by Southwest Indians Program sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Currently, he is a principle investigator with the California Native American Research Centers for Health (NARCH) whose goals are to increase the quantity and quality of research on the health of Native Americans in California and to increase the number of Native American students and faculty in California universities.

Calac lives in Escondido with his wife and three children.

For further information on the Calac talk, e-mail cfierro@ucsd.edu. For more information on the California Native American Day Celebration visit the website at http:blink.ucsd.edu/go/nativeamerican.

Media Contacts:
Jan Jennings, 858-822-1684
Pat JaCoby, 858-534-7404