Dr. Karen Van Hoesen is one of the leading authorities on diving medicine and physiology. Dr. Van Hoesen is a Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at UC San Diego and is board certified in both Emergency Medicine and Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine. She received her BS degree in Zoology from UC Davis and her MD degree from Duke University Medical School in 1988. She has been on faculty at UCSD in the Department of Emergency Medicine and Division of Hyperbaric Medicine for 21 years. 

Dr Van Hoesen has been the Director of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine Fellowship at UCSD since 1998 - one of the first fellowships in diving medicine to train physicians how to recognise and treat diving injuries and fitness to dive exams. She is Director of the UCSD Diving Medicine Clinic working to improve diver health and fitness and keeping divers safe. 

Since 2000, Dr. Van Hoesen has been a member of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Diving Control Board. She has served on the board of directors of the Divers Alert Network (DAN) and is currently an emergency on-call physician for DAN. She has served on Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society committees and held leadership positions at the local and national level. 

Dr. Van Hoesen has over 30 original research papers, book chapters, and abstracts listed on her CV, and over 100 invitations as a requested speaker on diving medicine, physiology and diving safety to divers, instructors, scientific diving officers and physicians. She has been a NAUI diving instructor since 1983 and has dived on all 7 continents. 

Honors include the 2014 DAN/Rolex Diver of the Year Award, 1988 Our World Underwater Scholarship Recipient, and inaugural member of the Women Divers Hall of Fame. Dr. Van Hoesen also has a keen interest and personal experience in high-altitude medicine and wilderness medicine. She teaches the Wilderness Medicine elective for the School of Medicine.