Long before she wore a white coat, Dr. Michelle Hauser wore chef’s whites. She trained classically at Le Cordon Bleu in Minneapolis, earning her Le Diplôme in November 2001, after studying culinary arts and hospitality management. Most people who go on to become physicians leave a former career behind. Dr. Hauser built her entire medical philosophy on top of hers.
Today she serves as President-Elect of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, a role she began in October 2024, and as Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine and Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, with a courtesy appointment in Primary Care and Population Health. She is also the Obesity Medicine Director of the Medical Weight Loss Program in the Stanford Lifestyle and Weight Management Center, where she leads evidence-based, non-surgical treatment for obesity and related metabolic diseases.
From the Kitchen to the Wards
After culinary school, Dr. Hauser earned her MD from Harvard Medical School, graduating in May 2011. Partway through, she completed an MPA at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government as a Zuckerman Fellow in Leadership and Public Service. She then trained as a Resident Physician in Internal Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance from June 2011 to June 2014, building her clinical foundation in primary care and internal medicine.
From September 2014 to August 2018, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine, focused on cardiovascular disease prevention. It was during this period that her two disciplines fully merged: she taught nutrition and culinary medicine to medical students, served as a primary care teaching attending for Stanford internal medicine residents, and pursued community-based participatory research using lifestyle interventions and technology among underserved populations at risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity, alongside work on food literacy, diet quality, food insecurity, and weight loss.
A Decade Serving the Underserved
Beginning in 2015, Dr. Hauser served as an Internal Medicine-Primary Care Physician at the Fair Oaks Health Center, part of the San Mateo County Health System, where she provided care in a safety-net community clinic and also served as a Stanford teaching attending.
At the same time, she built a parallel career within the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, developing and leading its Medgroup lifestyle and medical weight-management program. The model uses shared and group medical appointments alongside individual visits to help adults with obesity lose weight and prevent and treat obesity-related comorbidities.
Building the Teaching Kitchen
In January 2017, Dr. Hauser launched Chef in Medicine, an educational platform focused on cooking, nutrition, health, and practical kitchen skills. The project reflects what may be her single most distinctive professional contribution: creating the first comprehensive, open-source Culinary Medicine Curriculum for health professional training programs, published with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.
That philosophy found a formal academic home in January 2021, when she became Course Director for SURG244, the Culinary Medicine (Teaching Kitchen) Elective for MD and PA students at Stanford.
The course combines hands-on culinary and nutrition instruction to demonstrate that dietary change and enjoyable food are not opposing goals. She also teaches nutrition, culinary medicine, and lifestyle medicine to medical students and serves as a teaching attending for residents, fellows, and other trainees.
Growing a Program
Also since January 2021, Dr. Hauser has served as Obesity Medicine Director at Stanford, leading the Medical Weight Loss Program within the Stanford Lifestyle and Weight Management Center. The program provides non-surgical obesity treatment, including lifestyle medicine interventions, and addresses conditions such as hyperlipidemia, diabetes, fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, and other metabolic diseases.
Her Medgroup model has also been implemented across two healthcare systems, using shared/group medical appointments and one-to-one visits to address obesity and its related comorbidities.
Governing the Field Itself
Dr. Hauser’s institutional leadership within lifestyle medicine predates her current presidency-in-waiting by nearly a decade. She served on the Board of Directors of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine from November 2015 to October 2018.
In 2024, ACLM announced her selection as President-Elect, beginning a six-year leadership sequence consisting of two years as president-elect, two years as president, and two years as immediate past-president. It was also during her broader leadership within ACLM that she helped advance the organization’s work in lifestyle medicine education, including the development and publication of the Culinary Medicine Curriculum.
Two Disciplines, One Practice
What makes Dr. Hauser’s record unusual is not any single credential but the refusal, sustained across two decades, to treat her culinary training as a curiosity rather than a clinical asset. Her research, teaching, and program leadership all proceed from the same premise she has spent her career testing in real institutions: that helping patients eat well cannot be separated from teaching them, plainly and skillfully, how to cook.
