Year 4. January 6. Celebrating Our First Three Years Together.
This January 1, I turned three. To celebrate this milestone, my wife and I got up very early and went to Pasadena. I will have more to say about this later. On this first post of 2025, which marks the beginning of my 4th year as Chair of the Department of Medicine (DoM), I start with some reflections on the past three years and thoughts about the future. In my first email to faculty, which has now continued as a weekly update, I reported for duty, asked you not notice my mismatched socks and in subsequent early posts shared my travails with the DMV and other challenges inherent in moving to a new place.
A Reflection on Reflections
It is hard to believe that three years have passed so quickly. What a remarkable three years it has been! I have had the privilege of taking a front row seat to our department’s excellence, from watching our trainees and fellows grow into LEADERS in health care; witnessing our incredible faculty earn competitive research grants, receive lifetime achievement awards and be elected to the most prestigious societies in medicine; and being astounded time and time again by our staff’s ability to balance the many tasks required to keep our missions forging ahead. In short, it has been an honor to work with all of you, and I truly could not ask for a better team than the one we have here in the DoM.
In my first email to faculty, which has now continued as a weekly update, I reported for duty, asked you not to notice my mismatched socks and in subsequent early posts shared my travails with the DMV and other challenges inherent in moving to a new place. I also noted that the department was strong. “However,” I wrote in my very first reflection, “I believe that many opportunities exist for us to take things up a notch…I look forward to working with you to ensure that our DoM sets the bar that defines what successful academic departments of medicine should look like in the 21st Century.
In my second note, I launched a rudimentary survey to all faculty. I was struck by the overwhelming response (including your helpful feedback about optimal survey design). It became clear to me that our faculty had a lot to say and that your thoughts would be integral to our success. To that end, we needed to set up a structured mechanism for discussing the health of the department. In Week 3, I introduced town halls, starting with early career investigators.
These evolved into the DoM’s Wellness Town Hall series, special gatherings during which you all generously share your concerns and ideas to enhance the department’s success. Some of the feedback I received in these early sessions indicated that the DoM lacked clear communication around wellness policies, such as family leave. Today, we have that and much more: Under the leadership of Sun Yoo, MD, PhD, we established the DoM Wellness Office, a center dedicated to mitigating burnout and supporting the success of our people. The office includes a comprehensive central hub for all things related to workplace wellness — such as benefits, incentives and mental health resources — as well as programs and an annual survey to keep a pulse on the department’s well-being. Our latest progress is highlighted in my reflection on our 2024 Wellness Town Hall series.
After about a month on the job, I learned that many of you felt the DoM lacked a strong presence in the diverse communities of LA — that we were predominantly serving people of means. As one respondent to a survey question about the impact of our work on health disparities wrote:
"Our department has long prioritized expansion of clinical access and care for wealthy, privately insured populations and has referenced relationships with Olive View and the VA as being sufficient investments in under resourced communities. This attitude must be abandoned for us to truly realize the vision many of our faculty and trainees share and long to contribute toward — the vision of a department which serves as a powerful agent of equitable health care, the domain we have historically most neglected. Many of us believe our department is positioned to lead UCLA Health to finally become a socially responsible institution and national leader, if we intentionally commit and strategize toward this end.”
I heard your passion for and commitment to serving L.A.’s diverse communities loud and clear, and in the time since we have made it a strategic priority to Advance Health for All. Our progress on this front is exemplified in the expansion of the DoM’s partnerships with Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), which bring our world-class care to many more underserved patients.
A recent report by the UCLA Department of Medicine Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion — which I had the chance to highlight at the JEDI Chairs’ Symposium on Dec. 3 — underscores just how far we have come. Take our partnership with the Venice Family Clinic, a FQHC that provides health care to under- and uninsured individuals in West L.A. Over the past four years, we have expanded our partnership with the clinic to include primary care and street medicine, cardiology, pulmonary and sleep medicine, endocrinology and rheumatology services. Similarly, we have added primary care, endocrinology and cardiology services to To Help Everyone (T.H.E.) Health & Wellness Center, an Exposition Park-based FQHC that provides care to people regardless of their ability to pay. We have also added faculty to the rosters of Chinatown Service Center and Martin Luther King Jr. Community Healthcare. This is a great start, but there remains much additional work to do.
These partnerships are slated to grow even more over the next few years. At T.H.E., for instance, we will soon announce the addition of dermatology services and care from post-doc resident trainees in psychology. We are exploring the addition of an endocrinologist to our existing services at LA LGBT Center and addiction medicine and primary care providers to Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation and re-entry program based in Boyle Heights. I am greatly looking forward to nurturing our existing FQHC collaborations and planting seeds for new ones as we strengthen our ties to the L.A. community.
We have also sought to address the health equity gap by strengthening the pipeline of brilliant, talented physicians who will go on to provide culturally and linguistically competent care to underserved communities. This has been accomplished by continuing to recruit exceptional, diverse fellows and residents to train here. Moreover, I am very proud of the work spearheaded by Adam Cavallero, MD; Stephen Vampola, MD, MS and others that has built a robust education partnership with UCSB which provides students with access to pre-med curriculum. When I joined the department in 2022, DoM faculty were already voluntarily offering mentorship and teaching one pre-medical course to UCSB students (who previously did not have a pre-medical program). As of last year, we have expanded to four! By intervening at an earlier point in the pipeline, we are opening up possibilities for more students from diverse backgrounds to be competitive for medical school and ultimately to serve their communities as physicians.
We have also seen important growth in our world-class physician-scientist training programs. Over the past three years, the UCLA STAR program has expanded from eight people to 10 and the UCLA MTSP from 26 to 30. Alumni from these programs go on to lead universities, biotech companies and government organizations around the country, clear evidence of their track record producing exceptional scholars in academic medicine.
Speaking of scholarship, I am proud to say that our research mission is thriving. However, we remain acutely aware of the challenges ahead and are developing infrastructure to strengthen these missions. During our early wellness town halls, some of our research faculty shared that they felt our clinical mission took priority over our research mission, and that research faculty deserved more recognition both culturally and materially. To ameliorate this issue, we have implemented a structure to help them navigate their careers here at UCLA and beyond, particularly early- and mid-career faculty. We now have a dedicated leader, Executive Vice Chair of Research Judith Currier, MD, who is charged with ensuring that the needs of our research faculty are addressed. This is exemplified by the implementation of a year-long onboarding program to ensure the success of our faculty, and is but one example of many initiatives that will continue to be rolled out as part of our strategic plan.
The cutting-edge scholarship of our junior faculty, who consistently obtain extraordinarily competitive grants and publish in top-tier journals, is a testament to the quality of our research mission in the DoM. So too is the growing count of faculty who are elected to prestigious professional organizations in research and academic medicine.
Many of you have asked me over the years how our family are settling into life in LA. I could write a thesis on this, as each week we are learning more. That said, I am a fully-fledged Angeleno now, having received my first Jury Duty summons and voted on more ballot measures than I have ever done anywhere else in the country that I have lived. I have gone from pondering the pond of Westlake Village and being oblivious of everything on the 405 beyond LAX to traversing two-thirds of California, most recently the Central Coast. I recently changed my Instagram profile photo to me in an LA Dodgers cap. So, I am quite proud to call myself an Angeleno and to serve our communities here (and also to finally understand how the freeways work!).
We had one grandchild when we moved here, and now we have two. Their great grandmother enjoys meeting up with them during some her visits to LA when they overlap. I appreciate the many of you who ask about the wellbeing of my mom and grand children!
I assumed my role here during the COVID-19 pandemic, and very strong sense of solidarity and camaraderie here at UCLA was apparent from the start. As I wrote in my Week 1 reflection:
“I have been impressed by the efforts that all our clinicians and ancillary staff have made to cover each other when a colleague goes into isolation or quarantine, to ensure that we can continue to provide the best possible care to our patients. I want to give a special shout-out to our amazing house staff and our chief residents for deftly rearranging their schedules, giving up time off or elective time to ensure that all our ward services are covered. I also want to acknowledge our hospitalists and intensivists for working extra shifts and members of our research faculty who dusted off their licenses to obtain emergency credentialling to provide coverage in some of our ambulatory sites. As the pandemic grinds on, I am conscious of the fatigue that sets in, but encouraged by the resiliency that I have observed and the espirit de corps as you roll up your sleeves to support our critical missions.”
This willingness to collaborate is something I have continued to witness in many different capacities in the DoM, and it is the life blood that helps our department thrive. Thank you for your hard work, and I would like to reiterate again how fortunate I am to work alongside such talented, dedicated physicians and physician scientists. You have made these three years some of the most meaningful of my career, and I look forward to continuing to support your outstanding work for many more to come.
Mobile Clinic Project Wins Cultural North Star Award
It is no secret that homelessness is an intractable and visible problem in Los Angeles. Unhoused individuals are especially vulnerable to health challenges.
UCLA Health offers many resources for the unhoused. One such initiative that involves many of our faculty and trainees in the DoM is the Mobile Clinic Project (MCP) at UCLA, a student-led program that provides nonjudgemental, compassionate health care to those who live on the streets or in other under-resourced environments. In early December, DGSOM recognized the MCP’s significant contribution to the Los Angeles community with a Cultural North Star Award, an accolade that honors inclusive teams that go above and beyond to advance the medical school’s mission of healing humankind through patient care, research, education and community engagement.
The MCP has been a source of community and inspiration for Corinne Allas, a fourth-year medical student at DGSOM who serves as medical student coordinator for the MCP. She began volunteering with the clinic as an undergraduate — compelled to do so by her family’s own experience with housing insecurity when she was growing up — and found the experience to be “life-changing.” She feels fortunate to have had the chance to return again in a leadership role.
“MCP is truly a special, low-barrier space that fosters empathy and provides people access to services that they may not otherwise feel comfortable accessing because of their previous experiences with the healthcare system,” Allas said. “I am honored to be part of it each and every day.”
MCP faculty advisor and UCLA internist Sarah Goldgar, MD sees the clinic as special not only because it gives medical students the chance to practice clinical skills early in their medical training, but because it affords them an opportunity to learn about the lives of those experiencing homelessness and its impacts on their health.
“Our clients appreciate the space to talk with students who are non-judgmental and caring, and our hope is that this provides immediate medical care but also helps reconnect them to and rebuild their trust in the healthcare system,” Dr. Goldgar said. “I hope that this experience creates doctors who better understand and want to provide care to this very vulnerable group in their future careers.”
As the winner of a Cultural North Star Award, the MCP will receive $5,000 to fund events or activities that promote education and team-building among project members. The program will receive its award during a special celebration in March.
To Dr. Goldgar, the greatest reward is watching students take on leadership roles and grow in their time working with the MCP.
“Each time I go out to Mobile Clinic, I'm inspired by the compassion and energy our students bring, and it reminds me of why I went into medicine in the first place,” she said.
The MCP truly exemplifies the DoM’s mission to Transform Care for All. Please join me in congratulating them on this achievement!
Christopher Seet, MD, PhD Receives NCI Grant for T Cell Therapy Research
I am proud to share that Christopher Seet, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of hematology-oncology at DGSOM and a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Center and Broad Stem Cell Research Center, closed 2024 on a high note with a $2.9 million grant from the National Cancer Institute that will greatly advance his research on novel T cell therapies for cancer.
Dr. Seet was awarded the R37 Method to Extend Research In Time (MERIT) Award, which is a five year R01 grant with an additional two years of extended funding. NIH R37 MERIT awards are only available to early-stage investigators who receive exceptional scores on their R01 grant proposals, indicating that their projects have outstanding scientific value. Dr. Seet is a graduate of the UCLA STAR Program and hematology-oncology fellowship program and a previous NCI K08 recipient.
Dr. Seet and his colleagues Yvonne Chen, PhD from the Department of Microbiology Immunology & Molecular Genetics and postdoctoral scholar Suwen Li, PhD from the Division of Hematology-Oncology will use their MERIT award to continue their work developing cancer treatments using T cells made in the lab from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Their approach aims to overcome several limitations of existing T cell therapies — such the need to use a patient’s own cells — with the goal of making T cell therapies more accessible to more people with cancer. iPSCs are also easier to genetically modify than T cells from patients, and Dr. Seet and his colleagues are using CRISPR and other genetic engineering approaches in iPSCs to develop T cells that will be more durable and effective in treating a wider range of cancers.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Seet and his team on this much-deserved grant. I look forward to seeing the results of their innovative work!
Celebrating the Healing Power of Music
Physicians and musicians came together to celebrate the healing power of music on Dec. 13 at the Music & Medicine Event at UCLA, hosted by Niloofar Nobakht, MD, Director of the Music & Kidney Program and Mohammad Kamgar, MD at Schoenberg Music Hall. The program was the third of its kind — the first was held in 2018, followed by a virtual event in 2020.
“Tonight is not just a concert or a conference — it’s a moment to reflect on how music connects, uplifts us, and gives us hope even in the most challenging times of our lives,” Dr. Nobakht said in her opening remarks.
Music & Medicine aims to increase awareness of kidney disease as well as to celebrate the synergy between science and art. The event ebbed and flowed between performances from pianist and composer Safa Shahidi, cellist Aidin Nejad and violinist Marina Manukian and scientific lectures on research related to the arts and health from special guest David Akombo, PhD — a music scholar who teaches at my alma mater, the University of the West Indies — and UCLA Professor-In-Residence and geriatric psychiatrist Helen Lavretsky, MD, MS.
Thank you to Drs. Nobakht and Kamgar for holding such a wonderful event! Enjoy the performances in the video below.
Dale
P.S.
I started this post by sharing that my wife and I went to Pasadena to celebrate my third birthday. We were invited to participate in the Rose Parade by riding on the Core Kidney float that celebrates the work and devotion of kidney donors and their grateful recipients, under the directorship of Dr. Anjay Rastogi. It was quite a party! James and Jovan in the blue windbreakers, guarded the float overnight in the harsh Pasadena winter ! I am inserting a clip from KTLA news that featured the Core Kidney float and all the energetic participants.
Tune in at the 1:24 timestamp to see the Core Kidney float in this year's celebration!
Related Posts
As we approach the new year, we reflect on how far we have come as a department. I want to take a moment to celebrate[...]
This note will land in your inbox hours before Christmas Day and Hannukah and for many of you it is a busy time as you[...]
Last week was a busy one in the UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM), with many holiday celebrations, the State of the Department address and a[...]