Red Cross Disaster Services Hero Award Winner, Regional Director MedGlobal – Latin America
Dr. Kahler is a general pediatrician who was Chief Medical Officer for a municipal Federally
Qualified Health Center in Joliet, Il until his retirement in January 2017. He received a B.A. from the University of Illinois and an M.D. from the University of Illinois in Chicago. He did his pediatric training at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, where he practiced for the next 34 years. In addition to his work at County, he maintained an active pediatric practice in Hyde Park. He then moved to be Regional Medical Director for a large Federally Qualified Health Center in Chicago and became its Chief Medical Officer.
For 25 years, he has had an interest in global health and has participated in humanitarian work around the world from Mexico to Haiti to Tanzania. In 2016, he dedicated his time to the Syrian diaspora in Jordan, Lebanon and Greece. With his mentor and MedGlobal cofounder, Dr Zaher Sahloul, in July 2016, he was in Aleppo, Syria as the siege was completed. After returning from Syria, Dr Kahler retired from clinical work to dedicate his time building a humanitarian organization concerned with the needs of the displaced and desperate.
In 2017, Drs Sahloul, Anu Shivaraju and he established the INGO MedGlobal. There first deployment was in Bangladesh at the beginning of the Rohingya exodus of 2017.
Since 2018, Dr Kahler has been responsible for the MedGlobal project in Colombia serving the needs of the Venezuelan migrants and refugees.
In partnership with another INGO Global Response Management, Dr Kahler is establishing a clinical presence at the Mexico-Texas border in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico.
His journey and the state of the refugee crisis from Tachira, Venezuela north to Tamaulipas will be the focus of the presentation and ensuing discussion.