Dr. Tiffany Priester’s career has taken her from California to Malawi and now to Kettering Health, where she will help lead cardiology fellowship training while continuing a longstanding commitment to medical mission work.
Priester grew up in Loma Linda, Calif., a community with deep roots in Seventh-day Adventist education and health care and a place she said helped shape her interest in medicine and service.
“I wanted to become a medical missionary ever since high school,” Priester said. “My dad was a pastor in Loma Linda. My mom was a physician. So, it was a natural combination for me.”
Priester earned her medical degree from Loma Linda University School of Medicine in Loma Linda, Calif., before completing an internal medicine residency at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a cardiovascular disease fellowship at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Throughout her education and training, she pursued opportunities related to global health and mission work.
In 2011, she moved to Malawi as a General Conference Seventh-day Adventist medical missionary and helped develop cardiology and critical care services at Blantyre Adventist Hospital.
“I was the country’s only adult cardiologist at the time,” she said. “There was a pediatric cardiologist from Ireland, but I was the only adult cardiologist living in the country for those five years.”
Years later, Dr. Brian Schwartz, executive medical director of Kettering Health’s Heart and Vascular Service Line, saw the results of that work firsthand during a cardiac mission trip.
“I saw how she had transformed the ICU,” Schwartz said. “I saw the rigor with which she expected the nurses and the team to accept nothing less than modern Western standards that we would expect here.”
Priester said her experiences in Malawi reinforced her belief that health care and ministry are closely connected.
“As an Adventist, I believe that health care is a message that Jesus had for the population,” she said. “One part of that message is healing and ministry of healing.”
That perspective remains central to her work today and aligns closely with Kettering Health’s mission of living God’s love by promoting and restoring health.
Although she returned to the United States, Priester continued her international work in Malawi. She later helped establish Hearts for Mission International, a nonprofit focused on improving cardiac care in the country.
According to Priester, the nonprofit helped support the first open-heart surgery efforts in Malawi in 2023. Volunteer teams have helped more than 100 patients through six medical mission trips.
“One person can’t help everyone, but everyone can help one person,” she emphasized.
Schwartz said he spent more than two years recruiting Priester to join Kettering Health.
“It took about 2½ years to convince her and her family,” he said.
One of the primary reasons, he said, was her ability to teach and mentor physicians.
“She’s a really good teacher,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz said Priester will help lead the cardiology fellowship program while expanding opportunities for internal medicine residents and cardiology fellows to participate in international and cross-cultural learning experiences.
“It is a great opportunity to do an overseas, different-culture elective,” he said.
For Priester, the opportunity to teach was a major factor in her decision to join Kettering Health.
“I really wanted to shift from having an all-clinical focus in my career to mentoring the cardiology fellows,” she said.
Priester said Kettering Health’s Seventh-day Adventist heritage and growing collaboration with Loma Linda University Health also appealed to her.
“I’m excited,” she said. “I think it’s a good thing to collaborate more because you can actually do more when you have more resources.”
In addition to caring for patients, Priester said she hopes to help expand international opportunities for physicians in training and strengthen collaboration among Adventist health care organizations.
Schwartz said Priester’s impact is expected to extend beyond the fellowship program.
“She’s going to infuse her desire for excellence and the expectation of performing at a very high level into our fellowship program, which we hope will trickle down to all of our Heart and Vascular Service Line,” he said.
While she continues to practice cardiology, Priester said teaching offers another way to serve patients.
“You start thinking, OK, I can help one person at a time in my clinic,” she said. “But if I teach our future cardiologists to provide good whole-person health care, then it’s multiplied downstream.”
