Jonathan Sherin
Chief Medical Officer
Dr. Jonathan Sherin is a longtime health and wellbeing activist who has worked “Heart Forward” and spoken truth to power on behalf of vulnerable populations throughout his career at local, state and national levels. He has worked as a clinician, teacher, researcher and administrative leader to help others connect to a brighter future and stays busy as a father, writer, cook and surfer to stay connected himself.
Prior to joining the HBGI team as Chief Medical Advisor, Dr. Sherin served as Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, the largest public mental health system in the United States. In this post, he pushed for wholesale systems transformation by insisting on a bottom up culture wherein “grass-roots guide grass-tops”, advocating fiercely for behavioral health parity as well as outcomes-oriented payment reform, and focusing relentlessly on building out community-based (as opposed to institutional) programs, policies and practices.
Before his LA County tenure, Dr. Sherin served as Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President for Volunteers of America (national), a community-based safety net provider steeped in tradition that reaches and impacts disenfranchised populations in almost every state across the country. In addition, he spent over a decade working in the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), serving in his last post as Chief of Mental Health for the Miami VA and Vice-Chairman for the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami.
Dr. Sherin has functioned in many other capacities throughout his career and takes special pride in his work helping to design a reintegration community for homeless veterans at the Greater Los Angeles VA medical campus. This work, prompted by an ACLU lawsuit successfully levied against the federal government, resulted in a master plan for the campus, currently under construction.
In addition to his body of work in the health and human services sector, Dr. Sherin is an accomplished scientist who is published in the fields of neurobiology and psychiatry. He has received international acclaim for his research identifying a core sleep-circuit in mammals (the “sleep switch”, featured in Science magazine) and received a prestigious Kempf Award from the American Psychiatric Association for his conceptual model of the psychotic process.
Dr. Sherin completed his undergraduate study at Brown University, his graduate work at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and his psychiatry residency training at UCLA. He currently serves as volunteer clinical professor at both UCLA and USC.