Melissa Nothnagle, MD, MSc

Dr. Melissa Nothnagle is a native New Englander who ventured west to attend medical school at the University of California San Francisco after undergraduate studies at Brown University. She came back to Brown for Family Medicine Residency, and stayed for 15 years as faculty and then program director. A passionate advocate of access to reproductive health care, she co-developed and directed the Scholarly Concentration in Reproductive Health for medical students and co-chaired a national task force on Sexual and Reproductive Health in Primary Care. In 2017 her family decided they’d had enough of winter and moved to the west coast, where she became Program Director and Chief of the Family Medicine at Natividad, a single residency county hospital in Salinas, CA serving the agricultural workers of the Salinas Valley. 

Dr. Nothnagle earned a Master of Science in Health Professions Education from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands and has published educational research on abortion training, procedural skills training, professional identity formation and self-directed learning. Her clinical interests include reproductive health, maternal child health, and caring for Latino patients, and she is passionate about training residents for full spectrum practice. She practices OB and inpatient care for patients of all ages, in addition to outpatient family medicine and reproductive health teaching. She maintains her wellness through good friends, vegetarian cooking (and eating), CrossFit and spending time outdoors with her husband and son in beautiful Monterey County.