Luis Padilla, MD serves in the senior leadership team of the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) as the Chief Health Officer. Dr. Padilla is a thought leader in the Community Health Center Movement who helps direct NACHC’s efforts to advance health equity, grow the primary care workforce and support the mission of health centers, which provide high-quality, affordable, transdisciplinary primary care to over 31.5 million people nationwide.
Previously, Dr. Padilla served for nearly a decade as the Associate Administrator for the Bureau of Health Workforce (BHW) at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). In this role, he was responsible for over 70 workforce programs and 478 staff, and Director of the National Health Service Corps (NHSC), BHW’s largest program of over 18,000 clinicians. A key focus for Dr. Padilla at HRSA was improving primary care across the nation and developing, recruiting, and retaining a diverse and culturally competent health workforce; under his leadership, the Bureau expanded to its current budget of almost $2 billion and the NHSC grew to the largest size in its 50-year history. Prior to joining HRSA, Dr. Padilla served for more than a decade at Unity Health Care, the largest community health center system in Washington, DC, as senior health policy advisor to the CEO, medical director, and as a NHSC Scholar. He also served on the National Advisory Council of the NHSC from 2007 to 2010.
A licensed family physician, Dr. Padilla received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and a Bachelor of Science in biology from the University of California at Irvine. He earned a medical degree from Wake Forest School of Medicine and completed his family medicine residency at Brown University.
