Help Derek raise money

I'm proud to run this year's Twin Cities Marathon as part of the Hennepin Healthcare Foundation team — and I'll be honest: lacing up for 26.2 miles is one of the more humbling things I've taken on lately. As a trauma surgeon and critical care physician, I'm used to long nights. But training for a first marathon is its own kind of endurance test, and I'm doing it for a place and a mission that mean everything to me.

Hennepin Healthcare is Minnesota's first and busiest Level I Trauma Center — the gold standard in trauma designation, verified by the American College of Surgeons for over 35 years. As a regional referral center serving Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and western Wisconsin, we receive patients directly from scenes across the region by ambulance and helicopter. We also carry the highest burden of penetrating trauma — gunshot wounds, stabbings, and other violent injuries — of any hospital in the state. The people who come through our doors often have nowhere else to go, and the care they receive here is exceptional by any measure.

Beyond the operating room, I'm deeply involved in Next Step — Minnesota's only hospital-based violence intervention program, and one I'm proud to help shape and study. Next Step meets survivors of violent injury where they are, literally at the bedside, and walks alongside them through recovery. It's not just immediate crisis support: the program offers wraparound services to address the full spectrum of what recovery from violent injury actually looks like — mental health, housing, job support, community connection, and long-term follow-up that doesn't end at discharge. The goal is to interrupt the cycle of violence at the individual and community level, and the program has served over 900 people since launching in 2016. To learn more about the research behind this work, visit www.hennepintrauma.org.

My research focuses on the social and structural drivers that shape firearm injury — not just the injuries themselves, but the communities where they concentrate and why. Using tools like geographic information systems (GIS) mapping and indices that measure neighborhood-level disadvantage, our team works to understand the relationship between where people live, the conditions they navigate, and their risk of being touched by gun violence. That knowledge is what makes prevention possible, and it's what connects the work happening in the hospital to what needs to happen in the community.

But I'm also here for a different, quieter reason.

My family gets our care at Hennepin Healthcare. Last year, my daughter Olivia was admitted with a bone infection. In the middle of a frightening time for all of us, a child life specialist came to her room — one of the compassionate professionals funded directly by the Hennepin Healthcare Foundation's Annual Fund. They gave her a doll. She still plays with it. That doll is a small thing, but it represents something large: the belief that a hospital can care for the whole child, not just the diagnosis.

That's what the Foundation's Annual Fund does. It fills in the spaces that insurance doesn't cover and that a hospital budget can't always reach — child life specialists, emergency clothing so someone can leave with dignity, a hotel room for a family traveling from outstate, a warm meal, transportation to a follow-up appointment that would otherwise be missed. Right now, with Hennepin Healthcare facing real financial pressure, these are exactly the kinds of programs that need community support to survive.

I'm proud to be part of the Hennepin Healthcare Foundation team. I hope you'll join me.