Meet the New DEI Director of the Emergency Department: Dr. Ronnie Rivera

By Cassandra Smith, UCISOM Class of 2025

Dr. Rivera is a native of Phoenix, Arizona. His parents are from New York and come from Italian and Puerto Rican descent. His path to medicine was more non-traditional than most. While attending community college, Dr. Rivera worked in banking before transferring to UCLA and majoring in Psychobiology. He completed medical school at UCLA and went on to do his Emergency Medicine residency at SUNY Downstate / Kings County Hospitals in Brooklyn, NY. Dr. Rivera’s passion for Emergency Medicine stems from wanting to do more for people who are most at risk and wanting to improve the U.S. healthcare system. He wanted to help people on the worst days of their lives and treat patients regardless of insurance status. He loves the environment of the ED and felt it was a place where he could practice medicine in the most authentic way. During his final year of residency, Dr. Rivera served as the Chief of Education. With a renewed passion for teaching, Dr. Rivera went on to complete the Multimedia Design and Education Technology (MDEdTech) Medical Education Fellowship here at UCI. He is currently finishing his Masters in education focused on Digital Age Learning Technology at John’s Hopkins University.

In the Emergency department, Dr. Rivera is the assistant clerkship director and the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). At UC Irvine School of Medicine, he serves as a Dean Scholar for the Clinical Foundations (CF) course, where he teaches students how to take patient histories, perform physical exams, determine differential diagnoses, and much more. Dr. Rivera is also a lecturer for the Social Determinants of Health and LGBTQIA+ Healthcare lecture series within the CF course.

Outside of medicine, Dr. Rivera has numerous hobbies ranging from video games to gardening, cooking, reading and dancing. He loves to play Team Fight Tactics, an online battle chess game. If he is traveling, you may catch him on a cruise ship, as he aims to take at least one cruise every year.

One piece of advice Dr. Rivera would give to future EM physicians is try not to lose your empathy. He believes the U.S. healthcare system is broken and will eventually collapse if we continue on this path. He hopes it will improve when we make long standing, systemic changes that impact people over profits. He asks you to remember that you can only make the changes you have the energy and capacity to make. You should get involved where you can and when you can. More than anything, he encourages you to remember unconditional positive regard for your patients. In order to enter into healing relationships with others, we must find the empathy to believe that they can get better, regardless of who they are, otherwise the whole purpose of healing fails.