A Message from URI Co-director, Patricia Robertson, MD
Andrea Jackson, MD, MAS to Lead URI Pre-Med Enrichment Program
I am so pleased to announce that Andrea Jackson, MD, MAS, of the Gyn Division, will take on the UCSF leadership for our UCSF-Kaiser Undergraduate Research Internship/Pre-med Enrichment Program! Dr. Jackson has been involved with our URI program over the past years as a research mentor, interviewer and academic adviser. This will be part of her diversity work, which is a high priority to her and for our department! Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jackson to her new leadership role. We are thrilled!
So many of you have been research mentors, donors, and have supported our program in countless other ways. We currently have 17 URI grads in medical school, with 6 more admitted for this fall, many of them receiving full grants/scholarships! We continue to mentor our URI grads during their path to medical school, thus we have added the "PEP" (Pre-med Enrichment Program) segment to the name. We look forward to continued faculty and staff support and meeting our new URI interns in June!
I will be exploring, with Co-Director Juan Guerra, the expansion of our URI program to the other four UC medical campuses with adjacent Kaiser facilities, all of which have current URI grads enrolled in their medical schools. Kaiser has been very impressed with our commitment to diversity, our partnership with them, our outcomes (we track our students for ten years), and has encouraged us to submit a proposal to them to do this expansion.
Best wishes, Patty Robertson
Progress of Our URI Grads
We are proud to announce that this year that we have two URI medical students graduating from UCSF! Veronica Gonzalez will be doing an ob-gyn residency at the University of Texas at Austin, and Jaspreet Singh will be doing an emergency medicine residency at Highland Hospital in Alameda County.
URI mentoring continues on beyond the URI summer program and into medical school. We also have several URI grads working at UCSF and Stanford in clinical research during their gap years before applying to medical school.
URI Grads (Left to Right): Tiffany Chambers MS2 (Brown University), Minerva Pineda MS3 (UCLA, King-Drew) Camille Roque MS1 (UC Davis), Veronica Gonzalez MS4 (UCSF)
2015 URI Cohort
Research Symposium
The 2015 URI interns were mentored by a diverse group of researchers. This year, our URI interns presented on the following topics at our annual Research Symposium.
- Zina Ogunnaya | The Experience of Waterbirth (Jenna Shaw-Battista, RN, PhD, CNM)
- Cristina Batarse | Chemicals in Our Bodies 2 (Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH)
- Tram Huynh | Systematic Review of Preventive Therapy for Preschool Wheeze (Sunitha Kaiser, MD)
- Oliver Guevarra | Restructuring the Bridges of Medical School Curriculum (Amin Azzam, MD, MA)
- Carlos Martinez | Identifying Novel Mechanisms of Action of Allopregnanolone, A Neurosteroid (Sindy Mellon, PhD)
- Rahwa Hailemichael | Treatment Failure Following Myomectomy (Vanessa Jacoby, MD)
- Maritza Cardenas | Molecular Phenotyping of a Novel Epithelial Cell Population Isolated from Human Endometrium (Linda C. Giudice, MD, PhD)
- Katherine Chan | Descriptive Study of Infants Born at UCSF Medical Center: Focus on Breastfeeding (Valerie Flaherman, MD)
- Jessica Arango | Prior Cesarean Decision (PROCEED) Study (Mary Norton, MD)
- Julian Ponce |Teachers' beverage intake at schools (Anisha Patel, MD)
- Jenny Pelagio Castillo | Mosaic Trisomy 16 (Mary Norton, MD)
- Vin Lay | Sexual Orientation and Socioeconomic Factors Associated with Mental Health in Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes (Megumi Okurmura, MD, MAS)
- Kaylynn Conant | Understanding Chromosome Movement During Meiosis (Jennifer Fung, PhD)
- Diego Dubon | Evaluating Medical Student Performance in Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Competency Domains: Analysis of numerical scores and comment word count (Christy Boscardin, PhD)
- Alberto Romo | Measuring changes in knowledge of obstetric emergency care through simulation based trainings by PRONTO India (Dilys Walker, MD)
- Miriam Juarez-Vargas | Evaluation of Health Coach Training and Implementation at Two Rural Primary Care Clinics (David Thom, MD, PhD, MPH)