Dr. Steve Tarzynski is a pediatrician the Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Medical Center. He’s been a physician with Kaiser Permanente since 1984. He was born and raised in the Midwest, mainly in the Chicago area, by immigrant parents. He moved to Southern California with his Connecticut Yankee wife in 1975. The couple has lived here ever since, except for two years of medical service in southern Africa in the nation of Mozambique while his wife was doing her doctoral research in history there. The couple has two grown children. One daughter who is also a Kaiser Permanente pediatrician and one son who is an attorney and an officer in the United States Marine Corps. Dr. Tarzynski became a doctor because he was influenced by his own physician father and because of community activism in the 1960s and 1970s. He believed he could contribute to building a more just and healthy society by going to medical school. He continues to be committed to those goals.