Dr. Chakwas was hand-picked by Captain David Anderson to be the physician of special forces units who get shot at a lot. Her dialogue implies that she has decades of experience with triage, battlefield surgery, trauma medicine, reparative surgery and other military medical skills. One suspects that Anderson requested Chakwas for his ship since she was one of the top military doctors in the Systems Alliance.

The game stats above assume that the “every Marine a rifleperson” training philosophy applies among the Systems Alliance military, though it was never entirely clear who is a sailor and who is a marine (and what differences exist between the two in the Systems Alliance, whether there exists a separate medical branch, etc.). We also assume that Chakwas benefits from military genetic enhancements. That every Systems Alliance Marine receives basic infantry training will be confirmed in Mass Effect 3.

Dr. Chakwas’ rank is never mentioned - her uniform just reads “Chief Medical Officer”. Based on her likely age, precedents in real-life militaries, a very vague understanding of Systems Alliance ranks and her “respectable” (her word) position on Mars our guess is that she’s a Staff Lieutenant, but this is quite tentative.

Dr. Chakwas apparently mans the sick bay by herself, even when doing critical surgery. Presumably she uses specialised robots and virtual intelligences as her surgical assistants. This entry assumes that she’s an adept technologist with medical devices, and functions as her own pharmacologist thanks to VIs and knowledge bases. In ME3 she is seen using her omni-tool to perform rapid medical scans - a check-up within less than a minute. This speed might only be possible on patients whose organism she has already mapped, though, making it possible to just compare their current state and their normal state.

She’s a doctor, not a bricklayer !

Dr. Chakwas excels at xenomedicine, though aliens are not normally present on Alliance ships. She could do a medical check-up on an Asari without breaking stride, leaving Dr. T’soni surprised that a human physician could know so much about asari physiology. Dr. Chakwas had no apparent problem taking care of the health and wounds of Quarians and Turians despite their exotic biochemistry, and demonstrated extensive knowledge of drell physiology and mental techniques - as well as of Kepral’s Syndrome.

Since xenomedicine is presumably not a part of Systems Alliance training, she doesn’t normally have alien patients, and her medical studies took place well before first contact, one assumes Dr. Chakwas trained in xenomedicine on her own time out of personal interest.

Since she’s apparently a top-shelf physician, one could also imagine that the Systems Alliance sent her on some sort of medical knowledge sharing program early during the integration of the Alliance with the Council’s other militaries. This wild guess could explain why Shepard knew from the start that the Normandy could accommodate alien fighters and provide them with military-grade medical care - as Chakwas would be known for her involvement with such a outreach program.

It was also presumably Dr. Chakwas who, along with Dr. Solus, did the emergency surgery that saved the critically wounded Garrus Vakarian, and salvaged his right lateral mandible. Saving Garrus was apparently quite a feat of surgery, since Zaeed Massani - something of an expert when it comes to grievous wounds - didn’t think that Vakarian could survive the damage. Presumably Garrus’ old Unity implant helped, since Shepard was present to trigger it.

The good doctor is also knowledgeable and experienced when it comes to treating biotic persons, particularly humans implanted with the less-than-perfect L2 psychotronic implant - such as Staff Lt. Kaidan Alenko. She seems to be intellectually flexible and a good learner.

In Mass Effect 3 we learn that Dr. Chakwas is also proficient in chemistry - presumably research in several areas of biochemistry. She also mentions that she has many close friends among Alliance marines and sailors, and there are few Alliance ships without at least one friend of hers.

History

It is difficult to assess Dr. Chakwas’ age - humans in the Mass Effect future frequently live to see age 150, and one gets the impression that most people are still in pretty good shape when their age is well into three digits. By 2010s standards she looks perhaps 50, but she’s older than that - meaning that she grew up before the Mars discovery, the Charon discovery and first contact. Given her accent, one suspects that her formative years were spent in London or the Home Counties. In Mass Effect 3, we learn that she graduated from the prestigious University of Mumbai.

Dr. Chakwas stated that she enlisted right out of medical school - perhaps with the British military if the Systems Alliance had not been founded yet. She was driven by dreams of adventure and soulful, manly soldiers with piercing eyes. Though the young doctor discovered a more prosaic reality, she would remain in military service for the rest of her career. Dr. Chakwas likes being in the military, and would feel that she’s deserting if she stopped saving the lives of soldiers.

Dr. Chakwas was already in the military more than 25 years ago, during the liberation of Shanxi in 2157. Presumably, she was serving on a ship of the Second Fleet that participated to the counterattack against the turian Hierarchy during the First Contact War. Since she seemed marked by these events, it is likely that she was part of the medical teams deployed to help the ravaged human population and garrison on Shanxi.

Two decades later, in 2176, Dr. Chakwas was on one of the ships that intervened during the Skyllian Blitz, a large-scale pirate attack on the human colony of Elysium. When the military responders came in, they found the pirate fleet in disarray. A single Systems Alliance Special Operations trooper, Staff Lieutenant Mandala Shepard, had denied full use of the Elysium starport navigation facilities to the pirate task force for fifteen hours and counting, wrecking the invaders’ plan. Thanks to her, the pirates were mauled by the human forces that came pouring in.

Since Chakwas mentioned Elysium in the same breath as Shanxi, she presumably was dropped on Elysium to provide emergency medical relief to the population, which had suffered significant casualties and abuse during the thankfully brief pirate raid.

By 2183, Dr. Chakwas had already been serving under her compatriot Captain David Anderson for several missions — a prestigious posting for a frontline military doctor, since Captain Anderson was considered the flower of his generation of Systems Alliance Special Forces leaders. From context, it is possible that the doctor was already part of Anderson’s crew during the Skyllian Blitz. The doctor was content to serve under Captain Anderson, and considered that he used an appropriate mix of liberality and strictness in running his ship.

When Anderson took command of a brand-new ship, the experimental frigate SSV Normandy SR1, he took Dr. Chakwas along with him. He also brought two other officers with whom Chakwas was on particularly good terms. One was Staff Commander Shepard, whom Anderson had recruited not too long before as his XO and protégée. The other was Anderson’s preferred helmsman, Flight Lieutenant Jeff “Joker” Moreau. Moreau suffered from birth from a rare disease making his bones brittle, and required constant medical care. Over time Chakwas became an expert with Joker’s condition, called Vrolik’s Syndrome.

The healing game

In unexpected and dramatic circumstances, Staff Commander Shepard became the first human Spectre - the red right hand of the galactic Council. The Systems Alliance decided to loan the Normandy and her crew to Shepard, as they had been pressuring the Council to swear in a human for years. Though Shepard was upset to find herself displacing her Captain and taking his ship, Anderson assured her that the crew would be fine with this - which implies that he had private discussions with Chakwas and the rest of the officers beforehand.

The Normandy’s crew thus found themselves hurled into Spectre-scale problems almost overnight, and under the command of the toughest marine within the Systems Alliance. Things became hectic from the get-go. The whole crew was switched to code red readiness for several weeks with next to no shore leaves as the Normandy criss-crossed the galaxy at full burn, rushing headlong into ever-worsening crises. This pace required medication for everyone, chiefly go-pills and sleeping aids, and close medical monitoring.

Shepard further formed a special tactical team which saw an incredible amount of action while also running on code red, and was chiefly composed of aliens - including species with heterochiral biochemistry such as Turians and Quarians. The presence of a Quarian - Tali‘Zorah nar Rayya - also meant stringent medical procedures and specific logistics as the species is extremely vulnerable to contamination and infection.

Despite the pressure Dr. Chakwas held the line, keeping everybody functioning and patched up without incidents and making sure that the Normandy had proper supplies and accommodations for the new alien crew members.

Despite the demented operational tempo, Chakwas and the rest of the crew developed an impressive loyalty toward the new CO — especially once it was clear that Shepard was the only person who could prevent a catastrophe of galactic proportions by stopping entities called the Reapers. When it became necessary to ignore the Systems Alliance’s blinkered orders, the vast majority of the crew followed Shepard in mutinying to save the galaxy. These included Dr. Chakwas, who was rather beleaguered to suddenly find herself a mutineer but trusted Commander Shepard to do the right thing no matter what.

Shepard and her crew did save the day, though there were casualties - and even those crew members who had not seen groundside combat were now rather ragged. Thanks to Chakwas’ ministrations, the survivors were ready to serve again after some medicalised rest and a detox. The whole mutiny thing was quietly forgotten by the Systems Alliance — presumably because the crew was serving under Shepard’s direct command. Shepard being a Spectre made her immune to almost any sort of legal or disciplinary action, and one imagines that the crew was shielded by her impunity. The Normandy remained detached to STR service and commanded by Shepard.

In the wake of Shepard’s actions Captain Anderson became Councilor Anderson, the first representative of Humanity among the big boys of the Council.

About a month after the Normandy’s crew was cleared to leave the hospital and resume service, the frigate was ambushed by a sort of cruiser and her shields destroyed in one shot. Shepard immediately ordered evacuation, saving most of the crew - including Dr. Chakwas. However, Shepard was killed right after getting Joker into an escape pod.

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone

With Shepard gone, the Normandy survivors went back under Systems Alliance command, and a priority of the Alliance was to bury the alarming but unsubstantiated revelations Shepard made about imminent, galactic-scale mass extinction. As a part of this, the Normandy survivors were dispersed far and wide.

Dr. Chakwas was promoted to a high-ranking position at the Mars Naval Medical Centre. Though this was a good job she was unhappy about it - she wanted to be on a ship, she wanted to save lives in the thick of the action, and like many Alliance soldiers she was incensed by Naval Command’s lack of respect toward the memory of the heroic Commander Shepard. Though other Alliance officers quit in anger over this, the well-behaved Dr. Chakwas remained in the service - but she was looking for a way to return to the life. Apparently, she remained in contact with Joker to continue treating his condition.

(In the second game, Joker is depicted as being able to walk to some extent, which he couldn’t do in the first game. While this was presumably the result of a game engine constraint, it is also possible that Chakwas made significant progress in alleviating Joker’s disease).

Chakwas and Moreau were then approached by the human supremacist terrorist organisation Cerberus. Cerberus - presumably represented by Miranda Lawson - presented them with proof that they were about to bring Commander Shepard back from the dead. Though Shepard and her crew had been deadly enemies of Cerberus, Lawson made it clear that Cerberus was the only agency willing to resurrect Shepard and provide her with all necessary means to stop the Reapers. She also presented Joker and Chakwas with proof that tens of thousands of human colonists were being discreetly abducted, and how Cerberus thought that these disappearances were connected with the Reapers.

Their morale low, aware of the gravity of the Reapers threat and the lack of Council or Alliance action about it, and suspecting they’d be sidelined for years by the Alliance, Chakwas and Joker agreed to work for Cerberus. However, they made it clear that they weren’t actually joining the organisation. They’d take orders from Shepard and no one else.

Dr. Chakwas took an extended leave of absence from the Systems Alliance to rejoin Shepard - one suspects that she had accrued a huge amount of unspent leave time during her career.

L’chaim

Cerberus did accomplish its tour de force and unprecedented medical miracle - they brought Shepard back. However, the procedure had to be cut short by a few days due to a dramatic betrayal, leaving the resurectee in a state of shock and quite dead-looking. Dr. Chakwas’ medical skills were invaluable in physically and psychologically stabilising her once and future CO, then completing the repairs to Shepard’s rebuilt body.

(Chakwas had presumably been kept out of the resurrection project itself since she would essentially have been a spy for the Alliance documenting Cerberus’ new, extremely expensive medical research for free. This turned out to be fortunate, as the betrayal left the entire Cerberus research team dead.)

With Shepard more or less recovered, Cerberus handed an upscaled replica of the Normandy over to her, with Dr. Chakwas as the ship’s chief medical officer and Joker as the helmsman. The rest of the crew were Cerberus personnel, with whom Dr. Chakwas did not feel inclined to mingle. The doctor contacted her friend Engineer Adams, who had been the chief engineer on the original Normandy - but Adams couldn’t believe that Shepard could truly be back from the dead, and warily declined the invitation.

Early during the mission, Commander Shepard recruited Dr. Mordin Solus, a medical doctor and bona fide genius. How Dr. Solus and Dr. Chakwas worked together is never documented in the game.

Seeing that Chakwas was a bit socially isolated, Commander Shepard made a point to visit her from time to time. When the physician confided that she had lost a bottle of particularly fine liquor in the destruction of the first Normandy, her CO bought a new one. Dr. Chakwas and Commander Shepard started a tradition of downing a bottle of fine liquor together every year, and got happily drunk talking about the crew of the old Normandy. The doctor eventually passed out after drinking too much, and grew concerned that she had acted unprofessionally - but Shepard assured her that she looked forward the next bottle in twelve months if they were both still alive.

Who by fire

Several weeks into its mission, the Normandy was boarded by agents of the Reapers whilst Shepard and her personal unit were on an operation. The non-tactical crew did their best but were rapidly overwhelmed and captured, Dr. Chakwas along with them.

This proved something of a mistake, as Shepard immediately came to recover her staff, armed to the teeth and with her full tactical force. After hours of pitched battle against a powerful opposition, Shepard and her pack of badasses beat all odds and reached the cluster of cocoons holding the captured crew members. The shocked crew, under the guidance of Dr. Solus, made it back to the Normandy ; one assumes that Dr. Chakwas was the first to receive medical care so she could help process the crew and gauge everybody’s medical needs.

Dr. Chakwas was less shaken than the rest as she never doubted that Shepard would be there for them, even if that seemed impossible. Still, the experience was an harrowing one even for a seasoned military doctor - howbeit she insisted that she was fine.

Karin Chakwas, Joker and E.D.I. were the last to leave Shepard’s side as they accompanied her to Earth where she surrendered th Human military justice. Dr. Chakwas sailed through security - her leave had been in order, and she never actually worked for Cerberus. Though she had provided care to members of a terrorist organisation, this was an accepted part of her Hippocratic Oath, and the persons she has cared for had not actually done anything against the Alliance. The only danger for her was if Shepard was judged a war criminal, which was not the case. Furthermore, Chakwas was immediatly requested by Admiral Hackett to join a medical research project on the Citadel with a high security clearance.

Doctor doctor, give me the news

Six months later, Dr. Chakwas heard that Major Kaidan Alenko had just been transferred to the Huerta Memorial Hospital with severe wounds. She rushed to Huerta to see if she could help but saw that Alenko was receiving care from the hospital’s head physician, the skilled Dr. Chloé Michel, and everything had been done right. Shepard also came in to visit Alenko, and Chakwas seized the occasion, heavily implying that she wanted to return to the Normandy and couldn’t stand working in a lab. As she needed the best shipboard doctor she could get, the Commander agreed. Visibly relieved, Karin Chakwas immediatly proceeded to get her go back then board the Normandy to assess the state of her sick bay and the needed supplies.

Though the circumstances were dire, Dr. Chakwas could resume her true calling after six months of boredom - being a frontline naval doctor assigned to elite troops.

Description

Dr. Chakwas speaks with a distinct Home Counties, posh accent. One half-expects her to have been a lecturer at the Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine given her Only Proper English Accent.

She wears the usual suit for doctors, scientists and engineers in Citadel Space. Her Mass Effect 2 shoulder patches read “SR2 - Chief Medical Officer - SSV Normandy”. The last line is interesting, since “SSV” is absolutely not Cerberus terminology but a Systems Alliance term (“Systems Alliance Space Vehicle”) that Chakwas presumably kept to mark that she is most definitely not Cerberus. She doesn’t bear a Cerberus insignia either.

It is difficult to place her age, presumably due to genetic enhancements. Her hair is clearly grey from age yet she has but the barest indication of wrinkles on her face. She’s obviously in great health — she might be 70 or so, but she’s in markedly better shape than a typical 2012 US person half her age.

Due to her accent, hair and unageing quality, Dr. Chakwas reminds many Mass Effect players of actress Dame Helen Mirren. Her voice actress is another veteran British actress, Carolyn Seymour.

Here is a video of Dr. Chakwas talking a bit about herself :

Personality

Chakwas is a proper, responsible medical doctor contrasting with the gung-ho temper of the much younger marines around her. She’s not a hugely social person - and perhaps even something of a loner - preferring a few close friends to a horde of acquaintances.

She is passionate about serving on military ships — Chakwas just love the lifestyle and aesthetics, the noises, the atmosphere, the feeling when artificial gravity kicks in, the shore leaves on exotic planets, being with marines and sailors, etc. It seems that she also likes the feeling of being the caretaker of everybody around her, and one may get the impression that she’s something of a workaholic.

Part of her attraction toward this lifestyle may stem from her age - for half her life, the notion of being on starship flying across the galaxy was sheer fantasy.

However, Dr. Chakwas been living this transient lifestyle for decades, and appreciates having something constant in her life despite always being somewhere else. This anchoring role is played by Jeff Moreau - Joker needs constant treatment to cope with his brittle bones disease, and thus Dr. Chakwas has this one patient whom she’s been monitoring for years and who’s much less likely to get killed than the infantry fighters who usually frequent her medical bay. Dr. Chakwas is the only person on either Normandy who calls Joker “Jeff”.

Being an old Normandy hand, Dr. Chakwas would unhesitatingly follow Shepard into hell itself if asked to. Chakwas and Shepard share a low-key friendship, as the doctor is concerned with looking proper and professional in her dealings with her CO even when they’re not serving in the military. Dr. Chakwas respects Commander Shepard far too much to behave like her friend, and finds it more appropriate to remain slightly formal.

Karin Chakwas is apparently a connoisseur of high-quality liquors, enjoying the taste of small quantities of expensive alcohol. Her definition of a good bottle is something like a 900+ credits bottle of Serrice ice brandy, a particularly refined (and rather potent) asari liquor. Presumably the Alliance pays its senior doctors pretty well, since 900 credits is quite a sum - though it is implied that Chakwas needed a few months to save for a bottle.

Writeup completed on the 29th of June, 2012.