Heather Nye received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry at Duke University, followed by her MD and PhD (pharmacology) at Yale University. Thereafter, she completed a combined residency program in medicine and pediatrics at the Harvard Combined Program (Brigham, MGH, CHB). She joined UCSF as an academic hospitalist in 2003 and maintains educational, administrative and clinical roles as a Professor of Clinical Medicine. After nearly 8 years as a practicing hospitalist in medicine and pediatrics at UCSF, she joined San Francisco VA Medical Center Hospital Medicine Section to direct the Surgical Co-Management Service in 2011.

Clinically, Heather spends much of her time on the inpatient co-management service, a team which cares for hospitalized surgical patients on orthopaedics, neurosurgery, and podiatry. This clinical role has fostered great interest and passion in the perioperative period—and has led to several quality and systems improvement initiatives in the field. Among these efforts have been improvement & standardization of patient educational materials, decreasing unnecessary testing in the perioperative period, increasing collaboration among specialty services, and standardizing post-operative order sets. Heather strongly believes in the concept of "surgical home" and creating a more streamlined, transparent, and collaborative system for patients and providers in the perioperative period.

Heather has spent much of her career in medical education and curriculum development. She served as course director for clinical skills, developing a novel curriculum for physical examination education, pediatrics clerkship site director, VA comprehensive palliative care elective director, and currently directs the novel orthopaedic intern co-management rotation. She has developed a perioperative educational series for internal medicine residents, which is now being disseminated to surgical residents in various specialties. Heather’s passion is to utilize the unique hospitalist/surgeon relationships from co-management settings to foster better understanding of roles, create fruitful partnerships in education, and continually improve patient care and experience.