Year 5. June 1. Building and Strengthening Community Within and Beyond
The foundational goal of the UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM) Strategic Plan is to build community within the DoM, grounded in our vision and core values. This is because the success of our people is at the heart of our department. This week, I highlight three examples of community building in the DoM, led and spearheaded by our trainees. Our trainees represent our future. Observing your commitment to building meaningful communities inside the DoM — and importantly your efforts to provide critical support to vulnerable members of the communities that we serve — strengthens my conviction that you will continue to make positive impacts throughout the long arc of your careers.
Residency Conference Centers Mentorship and Gratitude
Internal Medicine (IM) Residency Spring Conference is a longstanding tradition in the DoM. Every year in early May, all of the IM residents, chiefs and program leaders gather in Lake Arrowhead to take a break from the demands of medical training to accomplish some key goals: to give and receive feedback about the residency program, to grow professionally and to build community. They also receive their schedules for the coming year.
“It’s so special that UCLA does this,” Karthik Ramesh, MD, who is finishing up his intern year, said. “I think that so much of our jobs involves taking care of other people, and it’s really special that we get to have some time to take care of ourselves and enjoy each other’s company.”
Each year the conference has a different theme, and this year’s focus was mentorship and professional development. The agenda featured inspiring talks from LEADERS from across the department, such as the plenary fireside chat with UCLA Division of Cardiology Chief Priscilla Y. Hsue, MD and UCLA DoM Executive Vice Chair for Research Judith S. Currier, MD, and workshops focused on topics like navigating the professional world post-residency and balancing one’s personal and professional identities. Residents also had the chance to interface with Senior Executive Academic Vice Chair Gregory A. Brent, MD; Vice Chair for Education Jodi L. Friedman, MD; and Senior Executive Clinical Vice Chair Tisha S. Wang, MD.
The chance to learn from our leaders’ experience — particularly women trailblazers — was one of the highlights of retreat for second-year resident Simrat Gill, MD.
“They've done so much in the field and are actively working to make our lives better as residents,” Dr. Gill said.
Crucially, the conference is a chance to nurture relationships with colleagues away from the ceaseless pace of training. Residents bonded over s’mores and hot chocolate, the UCLA IM Annual Skinner Cup Kickball Tournament, and tunes by The Ultrasounds, the resident IM residency band.
“Learning how to build close personal relationships with colleagues is a longevity and well-being strategy for physicians,” Lisa J. Skinner, MD, director of the UCLA Internal Medicine Residency Program, said. “It is such a unique and challenging job — I want our residents to graduate knowing how important it is to connect with peers who understand implicitly what it takes to do this work.”
Many people are involved in making residency conference a success, including some of the outgoing chiefs. Brady Bunch chiefs Anig’r Oriol, MD, Jenny Yineen Friedland, MD and Andrew Wootaek Hong, MD led the charge this year alongside Dr. Skinner and DoM education team members Bella Nadler and Nina Talverdian. They have been holding biweekly planning meetings since November.
“Organizing the conference this year was especially rewarding because of the massive team effort behind it,” Dr. Friedland said. “Andrew, Anige’r, Nina, Bella, and I worked closely together for months, and I think our teamwork and communication really helped us stay on track through this big undertaking.”
Dr. Oriol shared that her favorite part of organizing the conference was creating opportunities for residents to step away from the day-to-day demands of training and spend time together.
“It was rewarding to see residents from different classes connect not only socially, but also through conversations about career development and shared experiences in medicine,” Dr. Oriol said. “Watching all of the planning come together and seeing residents genuinely engaged made the experience especially fulfilling.”
Bella felt similarly.
“It’s really meaningful to see all of the planning come together in a way that gives residents a chance to relax and enjoy time with one another,” she said. “Then, come graduation, hearing so many residents share that this event was one of their favorites makes all of the work incredibly rewarding.”
Nina has been organizing the spring conference for the last few years. To her, each year feels just as special as the last.
"We are grateful to our coordinating team and the UCLA Lake Arrowhead staff for their hard work and dedication in bringing this tradition to life once again,” she said. “Thank you to everyone involved for helping carry it forward!”
Dr. Skinner noted that gratitude was a central theme of the conference. Not every residency program has the opportunity to gather, learn and celebrate each other at an event like this one.
“The conference has always felt special, but this year the gratitude was in overdrive,” Dr. Skinner said. “It’s a tremendous privilege to be able to do this and I am proud to be in a department that comes together to invest in our residents. Every colleague who covered a service, every team member who navigated the complicated planning process, every speaker is contributing to a culture that draws the best and brightest medical students to our program every year.”
The program is especially grateful to the family of Eric Esrailian, MD, MPH, chief of the UCLA Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases, who helped sponsor the event.
“We are honored to help!” Dr. Esrailian said. “We all wanted to support the residents and know how important spring conference is for the department and their residency experience.”
As Bella said, graduating residents often count spring conference as one of their favorite events. Dr. Friedman will never forget the conferences she attended throughout her time as a trainee.
“As an intern, I actually skipped a few days of my vacation to attend, and I’m so glad that I did because it became one of the most memorable and meaningful parts of residency for me,” she recalled. “There is something incredibly special about bringing together our entire program in one place and creating time for connection outside of the hospital environment.”
Dr. Skinner has heard others say the same.
“New residents have even told me afterward, ‘I knew it was special, but I had no idea that it would be one of the peak experiences of my life,’” she said. “There is something intangible and wonderful about having everyone together.”
Thank you Bella, Nina, Andrew, Anige’r, Jenny, Lisa and the many leaders who dedicated their time to giving our residents the chance to make lifelong friendships and learn invaluable lessons at spring conference! The department is also deeply grateful to the Esrailian family for their donation to the program.
Sprint Conference 2026
Health Advocacy Mock Clinic Gives Trainees and Students a Chance to Learn and Lead
Neurodiverse individuals — a group that includes those who are autistic or who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia or one of many other conditions — make up as much as 20% of the population. Yet many health care providers lack experience caring for this group of patients, and patients often struggle to advocate for themselves in medical settings.
On April 25, three residents, eight medical students and eight nursing students learned how to alleviate this challenge through the practice of neuro-affirming health care — or care that treats differences in brain function as normal variations rather than problems to “fix” — during the 2026 UC-LEND and UCLA Extension Pathway Health Advocacy Mock Clinic. This event brings together residents in the UCLA Med-Peds Internal Medicine Residency Program, students at the DGSOM, students at the UCLA School of Nursing and students who are part of the UCLA Extension Pathway program, a two-year nontraditional college program for neurodiverse individuals. Everyone takes part as a volunteer.
“This is a great opportunity for our medical students and nursing students to interact directly with neurodiverse young adults and for residents to model and teach other learners,” Susan H. Duan, MD, a primary care and Med-Peds physician who leads the event, said.
This year’s event marked the sixth annual mock clinic. Over the course of the day, the medical and nursing students are guided by UC-LEND clinicians in learning how to communicate effectively with neurodivergent individuals; Pathway students, in turn, are guided in how to express and advocate for themselves during medical appointments. This year the clinic introduced a new format: Medical students and nursing students worked in pairs to room and interview the Pathway students individually, then presented their cases to three Med-Peds residents — Lindsay Olson, MD; Andrew Chang, MD; and Rachel To, MD — who served as preceptors. The residents drew from their own experiences caring for neurodiverse patients to teach best practices to the students.
“We really emphasize learning from the patient how to best communicate and care for them,” Dr. Duan noted. Pathway students were asked to fill out questionnaires that give clinicians insight into their communication style, how they prefer medical staff to engage with them, strategies that help them stay calm during stressful situations and more. You can find a copy of the questionnaire here.
Dr. Duan is hopeful that the event will have a lasting impact on all who took part.
“We hope for our volunteers that it helps improve their knowledge, skills and comfort working with these patients in the future,” she added.
I would like to thank Susan, Lindsay, Andrew, Rachel, the DGSOM students, nursing students and Pathway students who took part in this important initiative, as well as the UC-LEND clinicians who guided their way. What a wonderful expression of your dedication to Advance Health for All!
Cardiac Camp Starts Heart Medicine Mentorship Early
In early April, 20 ninth and tenth graders from across Los Angeles took to the halls of the DGSOM to dissect pig hearts, take part in mock patient case studies and learn more about medicine from the brightest med students in the country as part of Cardiac Camp at UCLA, a fantastic community engagement initiative led by internal medicine resident Nirosh Mataraarachchi, MD and DGSOM medical student Mohnish Alishala. Cardiac Camp aims to close the racial and socioeconomic gaps in cardiometabolic health by inspiring students from low-income communities — which are disproportionately affected by these diseases — to pursue careers in medicine.
“Cardiac Camp isn’t just a program — it’s a way for UCLA to connect meaningfully with the community and invest in future physicians,” Dr. Mataraarachchi said.
The camp is free for students to attend and was specifically designed as an opportunity for those who are economically disadvantaged. The primary criterion is household income, with the initial cut-off at around $60,000 per year. The secondary consideration is the student’s schools’ LAUSD classification; students who attend Title I high schools, schools that receive federal funds because a significant portion of the student population comes from low-income families, are prioritized in the application process after income is accounted for. Students are then selected based on their ability to articulate their interest, motivation and goals in written responses to questions. They are also chosen from different schools, typically without prior connection to each other, to broaden peer exposure and intentionally diversify the pool of attendees. This year, there were 181 applicants from 44 different schools.
Among the alumni, “many students told us this was something they never would have been able to attend if it hadn’t been free,” Mohnish said. The program helps build a pipeline that could someday benefit the communities from which participants came.
“One of the aims of Cardiac Camp is to help educate youth from economically disadvantaged communities so that they may help alleviate medical distrust and provide health education in their own homes, if they so choose,” Dr. Mataraarachchi added.
The camp itself takes place over the course of three learning-filled days. On Day 1, students perform dissections, are introduced to patient case studies and learn about the path to becoming a doctor from a panel of medical students and undergraduates. Day 2 shifts focus to clinical skills and lifestyle medicine with an ultrasound workshop and a nutrition workshop, featuring a hands-on heart-healthy food activity. Additionally, they attend lectures on how factors like transportation, housing, income and food access affect heart health, as well as take part in an asset mapping activity in which they evaluate fictional patients’ access to hospitals, grocery stores, public transit and resources. Day 3 celebrates all they have learned: Participants present case studies based on real clinical cases, describing the patient’s medical condition, social context and barriers to care. Their parents are invited to come cheer them on.
“Each group worked through a mock patient case from start to finish — medical history, social history, diagnosis and presentation — just like doctors do,” Mohnish said. “We wanted students to understand not just the science of heart disease, but how things like where you live, how much money you make and access to transportation affect health.”
Dr. Mataraarachchi and Mohnish noted that the presentations on Day 3 are especially impactful on students. Some of them said that they were typically very shy and uncomfortable with public speaking, but that they felt safe doing so at the camp.
“That was really meaningful to us — not everyone gets opportunities like that, and public speaking is such an important life skill,” Mohnish said.
The three days at DGSOM are just the start: Cardiac Camp scholars are also paired with medical students for monthly one-on-one meetings that focus on academic planning, college preparation, resume building and long-term goal setting. The goal is long-term guidance that helps students think about college, careers and how to build the best possible path forward.
“As high school students, many of them said they couldn’t imagine ever talking to a medical student before this program,” Mohnish said.
As Cardiac Camp continues to grow, the program has now received support from UCLA Health’s Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology and the Women’s Cardiovascular Center, the DoM and continued support from the nonprofit FutureMedLA Foundation and the UCLA Campus Program Committee Youth Fund. This support critically sustains the camp’s mission of providing free, high-quality medical education and mentorship to students from historically underserved communities.
Dr. Mataraarachchi founded Cardiac Camp while he was a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco after feeling compelled to act on the health disparities he learned about in class. He himself is a first-generation college graduate and physician whose parents are immigrants from Sri Lanka — and knows that the faces behind the statistics often look like his own. Dr. Mataraarachchi believes that it is crucial that people from diverse backgrounds pursue medicine, because their lived experience shapes how they care for patients.
"Coming from an immigrant family, I understand and recognize the disparities that people like me — people of color — face, because I lived them,” Dr. Mataraarachchi said. “Cardiac Camp is about turning awareness of disparities into action.”
Mohnish was driven to launch the camp at UCLA alongside Dr. Mataraarachchi because of his own passion for medical education. Previously, he worked as a high school science teacher and started a free college counseling program for a Title I school, where he learned the value of long-term student mentorship. After organizing health workshops in free clinics in Mexico, he realized that teaching young people about health is the best way to prevent future illness. He saw Dr. Mataraarachchi’s Cardiac Camp as a way to combine long-term mentorship with preventive health education to make a real impact for the Los Angeles community.
“If we can instill a long-term planning mindset in ninth and tenth graders, that can be life-changing,” Mohnish said.
Dr. Mataraarachchi and Mohnish hope to build on the camp’s success by making it easier for students from low-income households to take part. That potentially could include providing stipends: Dr. Mataraarachchi noted that many students need to work during school breaks to support their families, and many prospective attendees might not even apply because they don’t have a way to financially compensate the time it takes to participate.
“This is about creating opportunity for students who might otherwise never see themselves in medicine,” Dr. Mataraarachchi said. “If we invest early, we’re not just teaching heart health — we’re shaping the future of the physician workforce.”
Thank you Mohnish and Nirosh for your leadership. You represent the core values of our department and are an inspiration to many of us.
Back Row: Anika Yadav, Ashley Van, Saul Ruiz, Zaid Amin, Ezenna Onuoha (medical student), Humberto Carlon Espinoza, Zoey Bateman, Hailey Kayode, Justin Legaspi, Gabriel Yuen (medical student), Tiger Do (medical student), Hilola Olimboeva, Aiden Lee, Emily Licona, Jasmine Patel. Photo courtesy of Jaclyn Wang.
Dale
P.S.
Speaking of community, color coordination appears to be another manifestation.
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