Toluwalase A. Ajayi, MD

Toluwalasé “Lasé” Ajayi, MD, is a community pediatrician, adult and pediatric palliative medicine physician, and clinical translational researcher. Elected to the American Medical Association Board of Trustees in June 2022, Dr. Ajayi is also chair of the California Medical Association (CMA) Council on Medical Services and immediate-past president of the San Diego County Medical Society, where she was the first black woman president in the organization’s 152-year history.

Dr. Ajayi immigrated to the U.S. as a political refugee from Nigeria when she was seven and grew up in Lawrence, Kan. She completed medical school at the University of Kansas and a pediatric residency at the University of Kansas Medical Center prior to training in adult and pediatric palliative medicine at the Institute for Palliative Medicine at San Diego Hospice.

Dr. Ajayi holds a joint faculty appointment at UC San Diego in the departments of pediatrics and medicine and is the program director for the joint UC San Diego and Scripps Health Palliative Medicine Fellowship program. Her translational research is housed at the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation where she serves as the digital health equity leader. She works clinically at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego as a hospitalist focusing on newborn care and as a pediatric palliative medicine physician, and at UC San Diego Health where she is an adult palliative medicine consultant.

A former chair of both the AMA Young Physician Section and the CMA Young Physician Section, Dr. Ajayi’s long history of leadership in organized medicine and policymaking extends to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), including serving as an AAP delegate to the AMA House of Delegates and advocating for the needs of children, especially those with serious illness.

Dr. Ajayi’s research focuses on opportunities at the intersection of novel digital medicine technologies and unmet needs in maternal fetal health as well as pain and palliative medicine. She is a member of the Pediatric Operations Task Force and on the Digital Health Technologies Committee of the All of Us Research Program with the National Institutes of Health, a member of the Palliative Care Research Cooperative, and the principal investigator for PowerMom, a research initiative investigating how mobile health can provide pregnant women with real-time, patient-reported outcomes that can be integrated rapidly into individualized clinical plans to improve health-related quality of life.

Dr. Ajayi lives in San Diego with her partner, Kyle Edmonds, MD, and their three children, Ayokárí, Tiwalolá and Palmer.

2023–2024

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