Dr. Vanessa Grubbs is a self-proclaimed country girl from Spring Lake, North Carolina — the youngest of six, and the first in her family to graduate from college or become a physician. As a high school junior deciding to become a doctor, she had no idea the twists and turns her career would take.

She earned her undergraduate and medical degrees from Duke University. After completing her primary care internal medicine residency at Highland Hospital of Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, California, she stayed on as faculty — until the research bug took hold. She left Highland for a general medicine research fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), but not before meeting the man she would marry a year later, a few months after giving him her left kidney in 2005.

That experience — becoming a living kidney donor — led her into nephrology. She completed the UCSF general medicine research fellowship in 2006 and the UCSF nephrology fellowship in 2009, then joined the nephrology faculty at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital as Assistant Professor, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017.

In 2007, early in her nephrology career, Dr. Grubbs identified a serious problem hiding in plain sight: the standard equation used to assess kidney function adjusted results based on race, systematically masking the severity of kidney disease in Black patients and delaying their access to transplant care. She raised the alarm. She was dismissed and ridiculed by colleagues for it. The medical establishment did not act for fourteen years. In 2021, the field formally eliminated the race-based correction — confirming what she had identified at the start of her career, and what Black patients had been paying for in the meantime.

Witnessing the disturbing realities of kidney failure up close drew her toward palliative care, and extended her writing from research into narrative. She has written and spoken in international forums on palliative care in nephrology, and was selected for the 2017 cohort of the Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar Leadership Program and the 2018 cohort of the California Health Care Foundation's Health Care Leadership Program. She has shared her perspective on a TEDxSF stage.

In 2019, Dr. Grubbs left her clinical research position at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital — driven by a desire to focus on writing and by a pattern of dismissal she had come to recognize as racial, not personal. She intended to continue practicing nephrology. Then the pandemic hit. The one East Bay private nephrology practice she pursued cited a hiring freeze — and soon hired someone else. Whether that was simply a preference for a full-time hire, or something closer to the same pattern that had followed her in academic medicine, she still doesn't know for certain.

In 2021, she learned that her own experience of dismissal in academic medicine was far from unique — that Black resident physicians across the country were being disproportionately dismissed from their training programs, often for reasons that had little to do with their clinical competence and everything to do with race. In 2022, she founded Black Doc Village, Inc., a national nonprofit research and policy organization confronting that disproportionate dismissal and the structural inequity behind it. She serves as its Founder and President.

In 2023, she returned to primary care, joining Baywell Health (known as West Oakland Health until 2024) — California's only remaining Black-led, predominantly Black-serving Federally Qualified Health Center — as Director of Adult Medicine. Its mission drew her in: the chance to practice medicine inside an institution built by and for the community it serves. She wrote about that experience for the California Health Care Foundation in "The Gift I Didn't Realize I Needed."In January 2026, she left Baywell Health to focus fully on Black Doc Village.

Dr. Grubbs is the author of two books: Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers (Amistad, 2017) and Negligent by Design: Anti-Blackness in American Medicine and How to Address It (North Atlantic Books, 2025). She continues to write, conduct research at the intersection of race and medicine, and serve as an expert witness in nephrology and race-based clinical standards of care — work she approaches with particular authority, having spent over a decade naming a harm the field is only now fully reckoning with.

She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their dogs. She also volunteers with the SPCA.