THE TEAM
Small by design.
Personal by nature.
Every person I work with is trying to become the next, better version of themselves. I spent 14 years helping institutions decide who gets that chance. Now I help individuals make sure they’re ready to take it, personally, and with a small team I’m building to grow alongside Illuminate.
Kylie Christensen, MPH
Kylie Christensen, MPH, is a public health and medical education professional with more than a decade of experience educating, advising, consulting with, and mentoring students across the healthcare education continuum. Her work spans high school, undergraduate, medical student, and resident education, with a particular focus on rural and underserved healthcare.
As the former Director of the Rural & Underserved Utah Training Experience (RUUTE) and Regional Affairs at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah, Kylie led educational initiatives designed to introduce students to rural healthcare, develop meaningful community experiences, and strengthen pathways into the rural healthcare workforce. She worked closely with students, faculty, healthcare providers, community leaders, and government partners while overseeing multidisciplinary teams and multimillion-dollar educational programs.
Kylie is passionate about helping students identify their strengths, explore careers in healthcare, navigate educational opportunities, and connect their academic experiences to meaningful work in their communities. Her background in public health, medical education, community engagement, and healthcare gives her a unique perspective on supporting students from their first exposure to healthcare careers through professional training.
Outside of Illuminate, Kylie enjoys spending time with her family, feeding her sourdough starter, and exercising
OUR STORY
About Us
Clarity comes from having sat on both sides of the table.
I didn’t start out planning to build admissions pipelines or run a rural medicine program. I started as a psychology student, first at Notre Dame, then finishing my B.A. in Psychology at Stanford, trying to understand what actually makes people succeed under pressure.
THE JOURNEY
From Stanford to the other side of the admissions table.
Medical school brought me back to Utah, and residency took me to George Washington University, where I trained in general psychiatry and completed a fellowship in health policy. A fellowship in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Maryland, where I also served as Chief Resident, sharpened that focus: young people, at pivotal moments, often need someone who can see past the file in front of them.
By 2010, I’d joined the University of Utah as a Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist. What started as interviewing grew, over 14 years, into something much larger: Associate Dean of Admissions and Idaho Affairs, a role in which I helped lead a process reviewing more than 3,500 applications every year. More than 1,800 applicants received an acceptance letter — and a personal phone call — bearing my signature.
Along the way, I earned an MBA from the University of Utah and an M.Ed. from the University of Cincinnati, and helped build the Rural & Underserved Utah Training Experience (RUUTE) from the ground up. That same effort laid the groundwork for a Southern Utah regional medical campus. Idaho’s class size grew from 8 to 10 students a year during my tenure, with groundwork also laid for a Boise regional campus, and I helped advocate for the creation of Idaho’s Rural Psychiatry residency program. All of it was driven by the same goal: addressing a real physician workforce shortage, and the mental health crisis affecting our country, one region and one program at a time.
In 2026, I left that administrative seat. Our professional lives come in chapters, and I was ready to turn the page — ready to grow, and ready for a new challenge.
Most recently, I completed a fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, a deliberate return to treating the patient as a whole person, clinically, not just a diagnosis. That same instinct, seeing the whole person rather than a single data point, is exactly what carries over into how I read an application or a resume: neither one is the whole story, and the best ones don’t pretend to be.
WHY THIS WORK
Because the journey matters as much as the destination.
I’ve read files that told me nothing and files that told me everything, and the difference was rarely the numbers. Test scores matter, but they’ve never been the whole story. The applicants who stood out were the ones whose experiences said something true about who they were, whose writing sounded like an actual person instead of a rehearsed one, and who could sit across from an interviewer and be honest instead of polished.
That’s not a checklist. It’s closer to a craft, one I spent 14 years practicing from the other side of the table. When I left in 2026, it wasn’t because the work stopped mattering. It was because I was ready for the next chapter, and ready to do this work directly, one person at a time.
“The journey matters as much as the destination.”
EXPERIENCE & CREDENTIALS
A career built across medicine, education and leadership.
B.A. Psychology
Stanford University
MD
University of Utah School of Medicine
Board-Certified Psychiatrist
General Psychiatry & Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Practicing Attending Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist
since 2010
Former Associate Dean
Admissions & Idaho Affairs, University of Utah
MBA
University of Utah
M.Ed.
University of Cincinnati
Founder & Former Executive Director
Rural & Underserved Utah Training Experience (RUUTE)
Fellowship, Integrative Medicine
University of Arizona
The Numbers
A decade of impact through education, opportunity and access.
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14+ Years
Admissions Leadership
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3,500+
Applications Reviewed Annually
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50,000+
Applications Reviewed
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1,800+
Acceptance Letters Signed
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6,000
Rural high school students reached through RUUTE
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555
Medical students sent on rural clinical rotations
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88
Rural physician preceptors recruited
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8 → 10
Idaho's medical school class size grew from 8 to 10 students a year
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2
Regional medical campuses — groundwork laid for Southern Utah and Boise
OUTSIDE THE OFFICE
There’s more to the story.
When I’m not working, I’m usually with my family. I’m a father of three children, and they are, without question, the most important part of my life.
I love sports, travel, food, and the outdoors, and living in Utah makes it pretty easy to stay connected to all four. I’ve always believed that the things we do outside of work — the people we spend time with, the places we go, and the experiences we collect — shape how we show up professionally too.
That perspective matters to the work we do at Illuminate. Behind every application, career decision, diagnosis, or performance challenge is an actual person with a life much bigger than whatever happens to be in front of them at that moment.
