Dr. Hagigi serves as the Deputy Director for Education Research & Training at the Veterans Emergency Management Evaluation Center (VEMEC) of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

He holds an academic appointment as a Professor Emeritus of Healthcare Finance & Operations at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and serves as Faculty Advisor for Strategic Management Research at the Anderson School of Management Executive MBA program.

Hagigi’s expertise focuses on the nexus of engineering, business, and healthcare, applying operations management and systems thinking to organizational strategy.

His career builds on more than 35 years of practice in private, governmental and educational organizations. His global activities span more than fifty countries where he has consulted, lectured, and evaluated healthcare and higher education systems.

He has directed his system thinking to emergency management, both locally and globally, examining organizational capabilities to respond to disasters and emergencies. He led the establishment of Africa Emergency Management System Collaborative, a coalition of UCLA and African‐based academic, private, and public stakeholders seeking to improve the emergency healthcare needs of communities in Africa.

He was a co‐founder of Emergency Management Community Collaborative, a professional community based NGO that provides a forum to share best practices and concepts in emergency preparedness. At the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Hagigi served as Director of Global Health Initiatives in the Department of Family Medicine where he collaborated with leadership and faculty of the department to identify and develop international public and private partnerships for training and healthcare delivery research.

He led development of blended learning and training material for the department’s International Medical Graduate Program.

As the former Director of the Executive Education Programs in Healthcare Management & Policy at UCLA School of Public Health, he led the Executive MPH Program to its first competency‐based independent accreditation. A Global Health Certificate option was a key component of the curricula redesign. He was the co‐founder and the Executive Chair of the UCLA Healthcare Collaborative (2001‐2010), a coalition that brought together UCLA Health Sciences Schools, Anderson School of Management, and industry leaders.

As the former Director of Advisory Services at KM&Co‐CPAs, he organized and managed multi-speciality medical clinics, IPAs, MSOs, and MHOs. A member of the leadership team at the Endeavour Development, he presented the winning proposal to acquire a decommissioned military base, repurposing it into a mixed‐use development.