Year 5. February 17. Excellence in Service
The foundational goal of our department’s strategic plan is to build community within the UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM), grounded in our vision and core values. There is no better way to celebrate this goal than to recognize and celebrate those who have given years of service to our missions. As such, I was very proud to see the strong representation of DoM staff among those recognized at the recent Service Milestone Awards ceremony, which honored staff across all UCLA Health. This week we also recognize some recent major achievements of faculty members as well as a symposium that shed light on some important questions in patient weight management.
Staff Recognized for Service Milestones During Special Ceremony
Our staff are exceptional; without them, our missions would not be possible. Those who choose to build their careers at UCLA and within the DoM are a particularly special bunch, as they carry irreplaceable institutional knowledge that helps all of us move forward.
At the 2025 Service Milestone Awards, held Feb. 4, staff from across UCLA were recognized for their 25 or 30 years of service to our institution. That included 22 staff members from the DoM, including six individuals in administration, three from the cardiology division, one from the UCLA CARE Center, four from digestive diseases, one from geriatrics, two from hematology-oncology and one respectively each from infectious diseases, nanomedicine, nephrology, pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine and rheumatology.
UCLA CARE Center research associate Ste’von Afemata was honored at the event for 25 years of service. She feels that one of the most rewarding aspects of her work was witnessing how the center’s research studies transformed HIV from a fatal diagnosis into a manageable chronic condition and develop sustainable tools for prevention. She recently had a happy encounter with a patient who she met earlier in her career.
“He expressed immense relief and gratitude to see a familiar face amidst all the new staff, which was a very rewarding, full-circle moment,” Ms. Afemata said. Patients like that one are the driving force behind her work.
“The patients motivate me,” she explained. “When you hear their stories, it moves you to want to do more and be present to do the work.”
For those who are just starting their careers, Ms. Afemata recommends soaking in as much information as possible, asking questions and welcoming challenges, as they can lead to new opportunities.
“The challenges will either break you or make you and by that, I mean you may find that you are better at something else within the same department,” she said. “You never know.”
For Raellen Man, a departmental research associate who was recognized for 30 years of service in the DoM, a major point of pride is the group of research administrators whose careers have grown under the DoM Fund Management Training Program, which she created alongside Cathy Rujanuruks. Ms. Man credits her own mentors, Farah Elahi and Linda Tanner Allen, with providing her the training, encouragement and support to continue to build on the foundation they created.
“I am proud of the vast amount of training we have been able to provide, not just for our DoM research administrators, but also campus-wide, through this training program,” she said. She considers mentoring the best part of her job.
“I love being able to help other research administrators. The job has become so much more complex than it was 30 years ago,” Ms. Man said. “Our funding sponsors are more diverse and the systems we use to do our daily jobs are more numerous and complex. Navigating these changes and finding tools and trainings that can make these processes easier or more understandable for our research administrators is the motivation I use to keep doing what I do.”
The full list of DoM honorees is shown below:
Administration
Arlene Bieschke | 30 years of service
Weiling Chen | 30 years of service
Raellen Man | 30 years of service
Teofilo Pazos | 30 years of service
Heather Herrera | 25 years of service
Harry Shahbazyan | 25 years of service
Cardiology
Rosa Chen | 30 years of service
Victor Grijavla | 30 years of service
Julie Sorg | 25 years of service
CARE Center
Ste’von Afemata | 25 years of service
Digestive Diseases
Karen Gray | 30 years of service
Harry Solorzano | 30 years of service
Nancy Garcia | 25 years of service
Yolanda Melgoza | 25 years of service
Geriatrics
Nelva Macdonald | 25 years of service
Hematology-Oncology
Silvia Duenas-Garcia | 25 years of service
Rose Estrada | 25 years of service
Infectious Diseases
Tamara Van Wagoner | 25 years of service
Nanomedicine
Yu-Pei Liao | 25 years of service
Nephrology
Lesley Blum | 25 years of service
Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine
Ying Ying Zue | 25 years of service
Rheumatology
Jennifer Wang | 30 years of service
Congratulations to all of you for your decades of service! Collectively you have provided us with 595 years of service. To put this in perspective, 595 years ago was 1431, some 20 years before Christopher Columbus was born! We are deeply fortunate to work alongside you and value your experience and your commitment to mentorship that ensures the continuity of all our missions.
Primary Care Providers and Surgeons Come Together to Learn About the Future of Obesity Care
It is difficult to overstate the upheaval in obesity care that followed the 2021 FDA approval of Wegovy and other GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s) for weight management. In just a few short years, Wegovy and Ozempic have become household names — and placed primary care providers in new territory in terms of counseling patients on options for improving their health through weight loss. In a time where there are reliable pharmaceutical options for major weight loss, where do old standbys, like bariatric surgery, fit in?
On Jan. 31, the UCLA Division of Clinical Nutrition brought together primary care providers and surgeons for a special symposium at Ronald Reagan Memorial Hospital to address this question and much more. Over 120 clinicians — most of them primary care providers — attended the event, where they learned from several of our clinical nutrition LEADERS and UCLA surgeons who specialize in bariatric surgery.
“GLP-1s are on everyone's mind, and in primary care, in particular, everyone's asking for them. I think it’s necessary to update primary care doctors on the right way to prescribe, the appropriate patients and how to mitigate side effects to take the greatest advantage of this class of drug,” Zhaoping Li, MD, PhD, chief of the division of clinical nutrition, said. “Secondly, with these effective drugs, we would like doctors to be able to counsel patients on whether treatment with GLP-1s alone is enough or if they should consider bariatric surgery.”
Dr. Li gave a talk on the evolution of the obesity management landscape. Among her division colleagues who presented at the conference were Dave K. Garg, MD, who spoke on navigating insurance complexities when prescribing GLP-1s, and Vijaya Surampudi, MD, MS, who gave an overview of common issues and questions that arise in the course of GLP-1 RA treatment. Speakers from department of surgery included UCLA Division of General Surgery Chair Raul Jacobo Rosenthal, MD, FACS, FASMBS, MAMSE, whose talk covered optimizing care delivery models to include both surgical weight loss and medical weight loss with GLP-1s; Edward H. Livingston, MD, who gave a presentation on the differences between real world data from electronic health records at UCLA and key clinical trial outcomes for patients prescribed GLP-1 s; and Yijun Chen, MD, who spoke about combining a type of bariatric surgery called sleeve gastrectomy with GLP-1s for patients with morbid obesity.
Dr. Li hopes that the conference imparted the knowledge that physicians need to help patients choose the modalities for weight loss that is right for them and to set achievable goals for better health that do not revolve around weight loss alone. She noted that she has encountered many patients who take GLP-1s with the hope of achieving their high school weight — something that is unrealistic for most and not necessary for overall health. The talks at the conference showed that while the drugs are more powerful than their predecessors, they frequently result in a 15 to 20% reduction in weight, but do come with many unwanted side effects, such as muscle loss.
“I want clinicians to feel that they have a practical information on how to counsel patients, select the right population for these drugs and mitigate the side effects, with the ultimate goal to improve health,” she said.
Thank you, Dr. Li, and to all who made the symposium a success! There are complete recordings of each talk at the symposium for anyone who would like to learn about these important topics; you can access it here.
Jonathan D. Herman, MD, PhD Receives Major Award for H. Pylori Vaccine Research
I am thrilled to share that Jonathan D. Herman, MD, PhD recently received a $5.4 million, four-year award from the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center at UCLA for research on a vaccine against the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. The award is part of a larger gift from Dr. Gary K. Michelson to the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy (CIII) to establish the Microbiome Vaccine Program (MVP). The MVP is a collaboration between the CIII and the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center in the Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases to develop microbial vaccines for gastrointestinal cancers and other inflammatory conditions.
H. pylori is a common bacterium that can be associated with heartburn, ulcers and gastric cancer. Though it was first discovered in the early 1980s, a lack of scientific tools has made it challenging to answer many questions that are necessary for vaccine development, such as exactly how much natural resistance adults have against H. pylori infection and where in the body a vaccine will generate an immune response.
“When we’ve made vaccines, we’ve focused on making immune responses in the blood or the serum and haven’t sought immune responses in the gut where we need protection,” Dr. Herman explained.
The award will help answer those questions — and many more. The funds will go towards Dr. Herman’s work within the MVP, as well as a collaborative project with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. Dr. Herman will spearhead data science and machine learning to understand what antibody responses can be protective from H. pylori. They will leverage techniques within proteomics, a relatively new way of studying the entire set of proteins produced by an organism, to identify which generate the most robust antibody responses.
“That knowledge will inform how we design a vaccine,” he said. The next steps following the research conducted under the grant will be to take the resulting target protein and the type of immune response to study whether it can inform a vaccine or therapeutic.
Dr. Herman joined UCLA from the Ragon Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital a year and a half ago. He was attracted to the DoM’s support for physician-scientists.
“It’s hard to find an environment where you can continue to practice medicine and work on cutting edge research,” he said. “That’s been crucial for me.”
Dr. Herman is also enjoying working with the microbiome center. This project marks the first time he has worked with bacteria — his research normally involves parasites and viruses. Herman says he appreciates the diverse angles and views his colleagues in the center bring to this work.
“This is an innovative way of integrating the microbiome with cutting-edge immunology to drive the development of vaccines,” he said. He shared his gratitude for center director Elaine Y. Hsiao, PhD, who was recently installed as the inaugural Goodman-Luskin Microbiome endowed professor. Dr. Hsiao has been shepherding Jon’s participation in the MVP.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Herman and his colleagues at the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center on this wonderful news!
Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD Appointed Editor-In-Chief of Cancer Immunology Research
I am pleased to share that Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD was recently named one of two editors-in-chief of the prestigious journal Cancer Immunology Research (CIR), a journal published by the American Association for Cancer Research. As an academic clinician with extensive experience publishing articles in high-impact journals, Dr. Ribas brings stature, expertise and a deep understanding of cancer immunology into this new role.
“It is an honor to be asked to serve as co-editor of CIR,” said Dr. Ribas, who is the director of both the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Tumor Immunology Program and the UCLA Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. “I hope we can build upon the work of the prior editors to have a next chapter of the journal.”
Dr. Ribas will serve as editor-in-chief alongside Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD, a professor and member of the Sidney Kimmell Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University. As they shared in an editorial article published Jan. 8 in CIR, their strategic goals for the journal include expanding its clinical content, adding more studies that employ computational science, systems immunology and technological developments; and be more inclusive of biomedical engineering studies that pertain to cancer immunology and immunotherapy. They also want to widen contributions across disciplines and the globe to increase access to cancer immunotherapies for all patients with cancer.
“I’m most excited about being able to expand interest in CIR by attracting more translational and clinical studies,” Dr. Ribas said. His vision is to make CIR the leading cancer immunotherapy journal.
“I hope to give access to the best science and advance cancer treatments by publishing high impact articles in the field,” Dr. Ribas said.
Congratulations, Dr. Ribas! Editorial work is not easy, and I am sure that the global community within cancer immunology will benefit immensely from your service.
Dale
P.S.
I feel like my mom is becoming a celebrity. We were walking through the lobby of Ronald Reagan Hospital last week and were stopped by Ilma Infante, a manager in our office patient experience. Ilma did not want to talk with me, but with my mom, who she described as her “inspiration.” Ilma, she really appreciated your words. I have advised my mom to bring a pen for autographs next time she is passing through the facility!
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