The Inaugural Dr. Jack Ruddell Memorial Talk

Title: Jack Ruddell Memorial DREAM Research Rounds
Air date:Thursday, September 18th, 2025

Speaker: Justin Bullock, MD, MPH

Bio:
Justin Bullock is an Assistant Professor in Nephrology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and the Co-director of the Docs with Disabilities Initiative. Justin is passionate about creating safe environments in medicine where everyone in the hospital is able to bring their authentic selves to work in the spirit of healing. Justin is a passionate medical educator: a teacher, researcher, and lifelong learner. His primary research focus centers on how educators can foster identity safety in the learning environment, where all members of the healthcare team can be their authentic selves in the workplace.

In addition to his education scholarship, Justin is outspoken about his lived experience as a Black bipolar physician. Drawing on his dual identities as a patient and provider with serious illness, Justin believes deeply that medicine is a lifelong journey of healing as much for providers as it is for patients.


Description:
Each year, during the week of National Physician Suicide Awareness Day (#NPSADay), we pause to confront one of medicine’s most urgent and silenced crises: the growing toll of suicide among medical students, residents, and physicians.

This annual lecture honors the life of Dr. Jack Ruddell (1994–2020)—a beloved son, brother, friend, and classmate who embodied curiosity, empathy, and brilliance. Like too many learners, Jack navigated his training while confronting disability and stigma in a culture that too often equates help-seeking with weakness.

In this first memorial talk, Dr. Justin Bullock braided theory, story, and vulnerability to call on medicine to move from extraction to sustenance. Framing his remarks with culturally sustaining pedagogy, he urged educators to preserve learners’ cultures, languages, and identities as sources of strength rather than stripping them away. Through powerful personal narrative—including his lived experience with bipolar disorder and moments of crisis—Dr. Bullock showed how compassion, therapy, and support can transform vulnerability into extraordinary clinical presence. He closed with practical strategies and a charge to create identity-safe, accessible environments where learners can ask for help, remain whole, and—honoring Jack—choose care over silence.

💙 Each year, a donation will be made in Jack’s honor—and in the name of our speaker—to the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP).

Resources: https://bit.ly/JackRuddell_Resources


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