Leslie Cadet
Founder & CEO,
ASCEND Occupational Medicine Consulting

Dr. Leslie Cadet, MD, MPH, QME, is a board-certified occupational and environmental medicine physician, U.S. Air Force veteran, educator, and entrepreneur whose career has been dedicated to improving the systems that protect people at work.

Her commitment to service and systems-level leadership began in the United States Air Force, where she served as a Flight Surgeon and occupational health consultant. Her work supported the successful execution of 1,080 combat missions and 2,000 airlift missions in support of Operations INHERENT RESOLVE and ENDURING FREEDOM. As Medical Director of her Flight Medicine Clinic, she led a 23-person team responsible for the care of more than 700 beneficiaries while supporting the medical readiness of approximately 5,100 active-duty personnel. She provided care and occupational health guidance to aviators, aircraft mechanics, intelligence professionals, and other service members working in highly specialized and demanding environments.

Her military leadership was recognized with the Air Force Global Strike Command’s 2015 Command Flight Surgeon of the Year Award and the 2015 Squadron Company Grade Officer of the Year Award.

Following her military service, Dr. Cadet continued her training at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she completed residency training in Occupational and Environmental Medicine and earned a Master of Public Health degree. Her career since then has centered on a fundamental question: How can medicine be used not simply to treat workplace injuries, but to build better systems for preventing disability, restoring function, and helping people return safely and productively to work?

Dr. Cadet has brought that perspective to clinical medicine, academic medicine, employee health, and workers’ compensation. At Loma Linda University Health, she served as Employee Health Medical Director, providing occupational health leadership for one of the region’s largest workforces. She remains actively involved in the education of the next generation of occupational medicine physicians as an Assistant Professor at Loma Linda University School of Medicine and attending physician within its Occupational and Environmental Medicine residency program. Her commitment to teaching has been recognized repeatedly by the physicians she trains, who selected her as Teacher of the Year in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2026.

Dr. Cadet is also the founder and CEO of ASCEND Occupational Medicine Consulting, a physician-led organization working to bring greater medical clarity, accountability, and direction to workers’ compensation. Through ASCEND, she partners with self-insured employers, claims professionals, attorneys, and other stakeholders to provide medical oversight of complex claims, identify barriers to recovery, evaluate whether diagnoses and treatment plans are supported by objective evidence, establish realistic recovery expectations, improve return-to-work strategies, and help prevent claims from drifting unnecessarily into prolonged disability and escalating costs.

Her work addresses a persistent gap in the workers’ compensation system: organizations routinely have financial, claims, and legal expertise guiding a case, yet often lack equivalent physician-level medical expertise at the decision-making table. Dr. Cadet has worked to change that paradigm by integrating occupational medicine principles directly into claims management—bringing together clinical evidence, causation, functional capacity, treatment appropriateness, recovery timelines, and the realities of the workplace.

She also works to expand the reach of occupational medicine itself. Through physician and provider education, employer training, mentorship, speaking, and practical resources, Dr. Cadet translates complex medical concepts into tools that professionals can use to make better decisions for injured workers. Her philosophy emphasizes appropriate care rather than more care, function rather than disability, objective evidence rather than assumption, and early intervention rather than allowing complexity to accumulate.

Across the military, academic medicine, employee health, and workers’ compensation, Dr. Cadet’s work has shared a common purpose: to identify where systems are failing people and build practical solutions that work better.

For Dr. Cadet, meaningful change in workers’ compensation is not simply about lowering costs or closing claims. It is about creating a system in which injured workers receive the right care, employers have access to meaningful medical guidance, claims professionals can make better-informed decisions, and physicians understand the profound role they play in determining whether an injury becomes a temporary setback or prolonged disability.

That commitment—to combining medicine, education, leadership, and innovation to improve outcomes for both workers and the organizations that employ them—is at the center of Dr. Cadet’s work as a physician and changemaker.