After graduating from UCLA, Duncan began a career in healthcare. After working as a project manager for both HealthNet and Wellpoint, Duncan was hired by Kaiser Permanente, where he stayed for the next ten years, serving as the National Manager for Content Development and Strategic Reporting. While at Kaiser Permanente, Duncan was accepted into the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health’s Executive MPH program, where he graduated in 2005 as the Foley & Lardner Fellow.
Duncan spent 2006 through 2010 in communications and online strategy roles at the Saban Pediatric Research Institute at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, Providence Health Systems, and finally at Cedars-Sinai. While recovering from a car accident, Scrymgeour decided to change careers and pursue a long-held dream of teaching secondary education. He entered CSUN and was awarded a teaching credential in English Language Arts, Social Studies, and General Science. In 2013, Duncan became a member of the faculty at John F. Kennedy High School. Kennedy is a Title I and Title III school within the Los Angeles Unified School District. In his first year, Duncan was asked to become the Coordinator for the school’s Biomedical, Health and Fitness Academy and subsequently took a fourth teaching certification in Career Technical Education within the Health Science and Medical Technology Pathway. The Academy sought to prepare an ethnically-diverse and gender inclusive student body for matriculation to higher education and into careers in healthcare. For the Class of 2016, both the Valedictorian as well as the Salutatorian were members of the Academy and will enter UCLA on their way to becoming clinicians.
After participating in a number of Special Education integration projects, LAUSD’s new Superintendent for the Northwest Division, Vivian Ekchian designated Kennedy as the school site for a new magnet school designed around a medical theme. After working with the school’s administration designing curriculum and hiring a faculty, Duncan is now the Lead Teacher and Career Technical Education Coordinator for the Kennedy Medical Magnet for the Gifted (Highly-Gifted, and High-Ability Student), which will open in fall of 2016. The school has a maximum enrollment cap of 465 students who have been designated as gifted by LAUSD. Part of the Kennedy Medical Magnet’s mission was designed to serve the district’s underrepresented populations by preparing students for careers in medicine specifically and healthcare more generally.