Indigenous Peoples Day 2025

Dear WesternU Community,

Today we observe our third formal Indigenous Peoples Day at Western University of Health Sciences, Monday, October 13, 2025. On this campus holiday, I invite us to reflect on where we came from, where we are, and where we hope to go.

We have a profound opportunity, and responsibility, to support the health and well-being of Native communities, as well as all communities, especially in the places we call home: Pomona, California, and Lebanon, Oregon.

WesternU is located within the current and traditional homelands of the Gabrielino-Tongva in California and the Marys River (Ampinefu) Band of Kalapuya in Oregon. On this Indigenous Peoples Day, we honor and pay respect to the elders, ancestors, and descendants who continue caring for these lands.

As an institution preparing future health professionals, I ask our community to commemorate this day by renewing our commitment to humanism.

Innovation, too, grows from collaboration, collegiality, and partnership. Breakthroughs happen when interdisciplinary teams that combine cognitive and experiential diversity, across thought, background, culture, countries, and language. Consider NASA’s Moon landing: pilots worked with physicists, software engineers with biologists, designers with instrument makers, distinct disciplines and lived experiences fused into one mission. That breadth not only solved problems but reframed them.

The greatest global literary, scientific, and medical breakthroughs originated from such blended swim lanes. Over the centuries, monolithic swim lanes have yielded incrementalism, while blended lanes have generated significant globally impactful breakthroughs. When we mix disciplines, and rotate perspectives across geographies and identities, we compress discovery time and raise decision quality.

This is precisely the vision and culture that we are building at WesternU:  interdisciplinary, globally fluent progress, energized by cognitive and experiential collaboration and partnership.

At WesternU, we are consistently, and ambitiously, catapulting forward, and we are not just improving what currently exists, but we are inventing what is next, together

With gratitude and resolve,
Robin Farias-Eisner, MD, PhD, MBA
WesternU President