Dr. Dean Xerras is from the greater Boston area and attended Tufts University where he majored in Spanish. In 1998, he received his medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine and went on to complete his medical residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he served as Primary Care Chief Resident. He currently practices general internal medicine at MGH Chelsea Healthcare Center, where he has also served as its medical director since 2009. As a Physician at MGH, he is an active member of various committees, including Primary Care Team Leaders and the hospital?s Executive Committee on Community Health. From 2016-2020, Dr. Xerras was the inaugural chair of the Department of Medicine?s Community Council, which oversees initiatives and programs within the DOM that aim to develop, strengthen, and support partnerships within the communities in which MGH serves, and provides paths to assist, advance and promote members of the DOM who are driven by the community mission. He is also a co-investigator of the Partners HealthCare Engagement and Communications team of the NIH?s All of Us Research Program, where one million people will share their health information and samples to build the largest, most diverse, health database of its kind. In addition to his clinical and administrative roles, he is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and is active in teaching MGH residents in their continuity clinics at the health center. Awarded a National Health Service Corps Scholarship while in medical school, he has devoted his career to community medicine, with the hope of reducing disparities in health care delivery among vulnerable patient populations, achievable in part by his membership on the Board of Health in Chelsea, MA since 2006, where during his 15 years of service, more stringent tobacco regulations were developed, as well as a city wide ban (first in the nation) of artificial trans fats in all food service establishments.