Dr. Kealoha Fox is Native Hawaiian Liaison at AlohaCare, a non-profit health plan in Hawai‘i, where she oversees organizational initiatives serving Native Hawaiians among the Medicaid and Medicare dual eligible population across all islands. In 2019, the Obama Foundation named Kealoha an emerging leader in the Asia-Pacific Region and the World Health Summit recognized her as a New Voice in Global Health in 2018. Her work utilizes a social determinants of health model of care that values culturally effective public health and medical services.
Dr. Fox is on academic faculty at the John A. Burns School of Medicine and College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and mentors many Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students in the sciences. She serves as a member of numerous boards, consortia, and task forces including the Institute for Climate and Peace. For half her life, she has been culturally trained in traditional health and medicine by revered elders in her community. As an early-career kanaka maoli scholar, Kealoha is guided by the proverb, E lawe i ke a‘o a mālama, a e ‘oi mau ka na‘auao. [S]he who takes his teachings and applies them increases knowledge. Her award-winning dissertation to improve cultural and linguistic standards in biomedical science–Kūkulu Ola Hou–explored cultural perceptions of illness and disease in an effort to understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent disease by creating an ethnomedicine taxonomy. She is co-author of the book Mana Lāhui Kānaka focusing on indigenous resilience.