Course Directors:

Colin Bucks, MD, FAAEM
Colin Bucks, M.D. is an emergency medicine physician at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Dr. Bucks’s extensive career focuses on disaster preparedness and response. Prior to his contributions at Mayo Clinic, Dr. Bucks worked at the Stanford University School of Medicine as the Marc & Laura Andreessen Medical Director for Disaster Preparedness and the Director of the Stanford Emergency Medicine Program for Emergency Response (SEMPER). Dr. Bucks served as Medical Team Manager with FEMA Urban Search & Rescue with Pennsylvania Task Force 1 and California Task Force 3. He participated in humanitarian responses including the earthquakes in Haiti and Ecuador, the Typhoons Haiyan and Irma, the Rohingya genocide, and provided direct care for patients with Ebola in Liberia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Bucks served as a frontline physician in addition to staffing Mayo Clinic’s incident command center.

Al’ai Alvarez, MD, FACEP, FAAEM
Al'ai Alvarez, MD (@alvarezzzy) is a national leader and educator on Wellness and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He is a clinical assistant professor of Emergency Medicine (EM) and the Director of Well-Being at Stanford Emergency Medicine. He co-leads the Human Potential Team and serves as the Fellowship Director of the Stanford EM Physician Wellness, and Co-Chair of the Stanford WellMD's Physician Wellness Forum. His work focuses on humanizing physician roles as individuals and teams through the harnessing of our individual human potential in the context of high-performance teams. This includes optimizing the interconnectedness between Process Improvement (Quality and Clinical Operations), Recruitment (Diversity), and Well-being (Inclusion). Currently, he is one of the 2021-2022 Faculty Fellows at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign.

Preston B. Cline, EdD
Dr. Preston B. Cline is the Co-founder of the Mission Critical Team Institute, which is an applied research institute focused on the development of an international collaborative inquiry community of Instructor Cadres within Military Special Operations, Emergency Medicine, Tactical Law Enforcement, Aerospace and Urban and Wilderness Fire Fighting Organizations within Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States to improve our ability to manage emergent and critical events. The institute was launched in 2016 at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and incubated there for several years before becoming independent in 2018. Preston began his career in the late 1980’s leading 60-day remote wilderness trips with adjudicated youth out of New Jersey he has since been cold wet tired and hungry on all seven continents leading both terrestrial and ocean expeditions.

Preston has received a Bachelor’s of Science from Rutgers University, a Masters of Education from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and a Doctorate in Education from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

Preston continues to contribute to the University of Pennsylvania as both a Senior Fellow, Center for Leadership and Change Management and a Visiting Scholar in the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative (WiN). When he is not working with Cadre, he resides in Annapolis with his extraordinary spouse Amy.