Dr. Bushardt serves as Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs, joining the MGH Institute in August 2022. He is also a professor in our Physician Assistant Studies department. As Provost, he is the Institute’s chief academic officer with responsibility for all academic programs, research programs, faculty, students, and other trainees.
Bushardt is a seasoned educator, researcher, clinician, and administrator with experience in rural, community-based practice and prior faculty service within three academic medical centers. He is licensed as a PA and pharmacist with specialized training and experience in caring for older adults and has designed novel interventions to identify and address inappropriate polypharmacy and reduce the risk of drug injury. As a PA, he has spent more than twenty years in primary care practice, including family medicine, general internal medicine, and geriatrics settings.
In research, Bushardt has chiefly led training grants and workforce development programs focused on increasing workforce diversity and advancing career opportunities for health professionals in medically underserved communities and health professional shortage areas. He recently served as principal investigator (PI) for the GW Health Careers Opportunity Program, a healthcare workforce development program funded by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, and is leading Project RESULT, an expansion of practitioner training in substance use disorders program funded by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. He is a prolific scholar and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and abstracts.
Prior to joining MGH, he served as professor and senior associate dean in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at George Washington University (GW) in Washington, D.C. In his leadership role at GW, he oversaw departments and centers comprising more than forty programs in the health professions and translational sciences. He also served as co-director of the Clinical Translational Science Institute at Children’s National (CTSI-CN), funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Science, and led its translational workforce development program. He also established the first postdoctoral research fellowship program focused on primary care research at GW, serving as PI of a T32-funded Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award. Prior to that, he served as a department chair at Wake Forest School of Medicine and associate vice president for workforce and process innovation in the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. And previously, he was associate professor and division chief for PA studies at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
Bushardt grew up in a small, rural town in South Carolina and became a pharmacist like his father. He attended the University of South Carolina and earned a BS in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1998 and graduated in 1999 with a Doctor of Pharmacy degree. He later attended the Medical University of South Carolina where he trained and practiced as a PA.
Bushardt is editor-in-chief emeritus for the Journal of the American Academy of PAs. He also serves on the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education within the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He is married to his wife Christin and has three daughters and lives in Brookline, MA.
To view Dr. Bushardt's recent publications, please visit his Google Scholar page.
