Dr. Bonham is a psychiatrist who completed her residency and a fellowship in rural and community psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. She attended medical school at the University of Nottingham in the UK. Her research interest is the evaluation and implementation of best practices for enhancing the social and family support for consumers in the behavioral health system.
Christine Bower, M.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Christine Bower, M.D., completed her undergraduate studies at Brown University. She received Magna Cum Laude honors to go along with her bachelor’s degree in Human Biology. Dr. Bower then went on to the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry to obtain her medical degree. She completed Neurology training at UCLA in 2006. Since then, she has been working on the completion of her fellowship in clinical epilepsy. She would like to focus her research on patients with epilepsy and their potential barriers to coordinated care. She is particularly interested in examining the care of vulnerable groups such as persons with disabilities or language barriers.
Dr. DeCamp is a pediatrician who completed her residency at the University of North Carolina. She attended medical school at Duke, and during this time also received an MSPH from the University of North Carolina in the Department of Maternal and Child Health. Her research interest lies in reducing health disparities among Latino children. She plans to study how family and community level factors influence health care access and use as well as the impact of policy initiatives, such as dissemination of the medical home concept, on health disparities.
Stanley Frencher, M.D., M.P.H. University of California, Los Angeles
Stanley Frencher, M.D., M.P.H., (ACS Scholar) graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in Biology/Sociology. He specialized in Health and Aging, as well as in Social, Inequality: Race, Class, Gender. Dr. Frencher earned his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. During medical school, he obtained a master’s degree in Public Health at Columbia University as a Macy’s Scholar. He is completing his General Surgery residency training at Yale New Haven Hospital aiming toward a career in thoracic oncology. Dr. Frencher is interested in quality of surgical care, appropriateness of care and health care disparities. He would like to research the risk factors for surgical diseases, including thoracic and the outcomes of surgical interventions. In addition, he endeavors to develop metrics and policies in order to decrease risk factors, increase patient’s access to treatments and improve quality of care.
Katherine Goodrich, MD is an internist who received her undergraduate degree in biology from Rhodes College and her medical degree from Louisiana State University. Dr. Goodrich completed her residency at George Washington University Hospital after which she stayed on and was most recently the Division Chief of Hospital Medicine. Her primary research interest is in transitions of care from hospital to community/nursing facility especially for vulnerable populations and patients of low health literacy. She is also interested in various inpatient quality topics, most of which revolve also around health literacy as well as patient safety and palliative care.
Dr. Hollingsworth (VA Scholar) is a urologist who received his medical degree from Georgetown University and completed his residency training at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on two areas: understanding the barriers to and promoters of technology diffusion and exploring the role that incentives play in predicting patient and provider behavior.
Lara Johnson, MD is a pediatrician who received her undergraduate degree in cell and molecular biology at Texas Tech University. She received her medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine and completed her pediatric residency at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center where she stayed on as a hospitalist before starting the Scholars Program. Dr. Johnson is interested in healthcare disparities in pediatric acute care in rural versus non-rural settings. She is also interested in pursuing a qualitative approach with rural practitioners as subjects.
J. Jane Shin Jue, MD,(VA Scholar)(Internal Medicine) received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her medical degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. During her time in medical school she founded a free health clinic which continues to serve the homeless and marginalized community of Manhattan's lower East side. Completing her residency in Internal Medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, she also received special training in global health medicine. Uganda, India, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Brazil are some of the places where she has done medical work. She was a 2007 recipient of the AMA Leadership Award. Areas of prior research for Dr. Jue include barriers to HIV testing, diabetes disparities, and also professionalism in medical education. She is currently working on research in adolescent obesity. Other areas of interest include the impact of media in health promotion, ethics in health care management and heath care financing, and ethics in medical training.
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Sonali Kulkarni, M.D., M.P.H., University of California, Los Angeles
Sonali Kulkarni, M.D., M.P.H., was a Magna Cum Laude graduate from Duke University with a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Policy with a focus on Environmental Health. She completed her medical degree at Duke University’s School of Medicine and a master’s degree in Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She completed her residency in internal medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Her research interests focus around improving access to care for underserved populations such as patients with limited English proficiency and patients who have been in the correctional system. She is also interested in studying ways that the physical environment and public policy affect population health and activity.
Adam Landman, MD (VA Scholar) is an emergency physician who received his undergraduate degree from Cornell and then earned a Master of Information Systems (MIS) and a Master of Science (MS) in Healthcare Policy and Management from Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Landman received his medical degree from UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and completed his emergency medicine residency at UCLA Medical Center. His research interest is the innovative application of information technology (IT) to improve the delivery of emergency care.
Danil Makarov, MD (VA Scholar) is a urologist who received his undergraduate degree in economics from Yale University. He earned his medical degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and completed his residency in urology at Johns Hopkins's Brady Urological Institute. After completion of his residency, Dr. Makarov continued on faculty as an Instructor in urology. His research interests include prostate cancer, urologic oncology, biomarkers, and quality of life.
Rhonda Mattox, M.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Rhonda Mattox, M.D., (VA Scholar) was a Biology major and Religion and Philosophy minor at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. She completed her medical degree from University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences College of Medicine. As a Clinical Scholar, Dr. Mattox will focus her research towards developing interventions aimed at reducing the stigma of mental illness among the African-American community. Specifically, she would like to work with faith-based programs to improve African-Americans’ access to treatment and outcomes in mental health.
Sierra Matula, M.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Sierra Matula, M.D., (VA Scholar) attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She finished her bachelor’s degree in an independent concentration of Health and Community with Cum Laude honors. Dr. Matula then completed her medical degree at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. She completed a one-year internship at the University of California at San Francisco and is currently a General Surgery resident there. Her research would focus on health disparities and access to surgical care. Dr. Matula would like to study how sociopolitical issues affect the extent of surgical disease at presentation. She would also like to research issues impacting organ allocation policies for transplantation.
Zachary Meisel MD, MPH,(Emergency Medicine) received his undergraduate degree in History at Columbia. He received his medical and public health degrees at Johns Hopkins and completed his residency as chief resident at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in how health care workers communicate with each other during emergencies and is particularly interested in patient safety during transitions in care from EMS to hospital settings. He is a contributing columnist for the online journal Slate, and is interested in evaluating methods to improve the dissemination of health services concepts to influential, non-medical decision makers.
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Bergen Nelson, M.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Bergen Nelson, M.D., graduated Magna Cum Laude from Wellesley College in Massachusetts with a bachelor's degree in Psychobiology. She then spent two years teaching bilingual students in a public elementary school in Manhattan, through the Teach for America program, before attending Harvard Medical School, where she received her medical degree in 2004. She completed residency in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, in the Pediatric Leadership for the Underserved (PLUS) program. As a Clinical Scholar, Dr. Nelson would like to develop partnerships between pediatric health services and education systems, evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to improve developmental and educational outcomes for at-risk children and youth.
Mark Neuman, MD, (Anesthesiology) is an anesthesiologist who attended Yale College and the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. He completed his training in anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. Dr. Neuman’s research examines the intersection of acute surgical care and the medical management of chronic conditions in the elderly. His current projects focus on strategies for improving inpatient care for patients with hip fracture and reducing rates of re-admission after surgical procedures.
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Dr. Padela is an emergency medicine physician whose research interests span transcultural bioethics, cultural accommodation and healthcare disparities. He holds bachelor degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Classical Arabic & Literature, attended medical school at Weill Cornell, and completed his residency at the University of Rochester. His other professional interests are in international medicine as he has spent time professionally in Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. Currently his projects focus on clinical accommodation and cultural obstacles to care for American-Muslim populations.
Michael Phipps, MD is a neurologist who earned his undergraduate degree in molecular and cell biology and psychology at the University of California-Berkeley and his medical degree from Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. Dr. Phipps completed his neurology residency at Yale Medical School. He is interested in researching all aspects of stroke care, including epidemiology of stroke, patient education of stroke, acute therapies, primary and secondary prevention, and rehabilitation.
Matthew Press, M.D., (VA Scholar) (Internal Medicine) received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University. He completed his internal medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He also has studied at the London School of Economics. His current research interests include the impact of organizational culture and workplace characteristics on health care quality.
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Adam Richards, M.D., M.P.H. University of California, Los Angeles
Adam Richards, M.D., M.P.H., finished his undergraduate degree at Harvard College with Cum Laude honors in History and Literature that focused on the African-American experience. He then completed his post-baccalaureate coursework at the University of California, Los Angeles and Harvard University. Dr. Richards obtained degrees in public health and medicine from Johns Hopkins, and he completed residency training in social internal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York. Since 2001, Dr. Richards has worked with a non-governmental organization training ethnic health workers to deliver cross-border humanitarian assistance to displaced populations in Burma. His previous research has focused on malaria control and human resources in complex emergencies, and the development of novel population-based methods to estimate associations between health outcomes and human rights violations. Dr. Richards is interested in working with migrant and/or Latino populations in Los Angeles, “training health workers in basic principles of epidemiology to evaluate programs and generate data for advocacy” to improve cross-border access to care.
Trudy Singzon, M.D., M.P.H. University of California, Los Angeles
Trudy Singzon, M.D., M.P.H., was a Political Science major at the University of Pittsburgh. She finished with Magna Cum Laude honors as well as a certificate in Latin American Studies. After a one-year stay in Taipei, Taiwan to study Mandarin Chinese. Dr. Singzon returned to the U.S. and worked for several consulting firms in Washington D.C. She administered various USAID projects in Asia and the former Soviet Union and, in her final year, focused on domestic healthcare projects and built provider networks for Medicaid health plans. After completing a post-baccalaureate premedical program at Goucher College, she went on to obtain her doctorate in medicine from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at UNC, she attained her master’s degree in Public Health and an interdisciplinary certificate in Health Disparities. Dr. Singzon has completed her Family and Community Medicine residency program at the University of California, San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital. As a Clinical Scholar, she would like to focus her research on HIV prevention of high-risk urban adolescents. Other interests include improving patient-physician communication to strengthen therapeutic relationships and educating and empowering underserved communities to make healthier choices to prevent chronic illness.
Charmaine Smith Wright, MD University of Pennsylvania
Charmaine Smith Wright, MD,(Internal Medicine /Pediatrics) grew up in Illinois, then went to Harvard for college and medical school. She completed her residency in combined internal medicine and pediatrics at Harvard's Combined med-peds program and was selected chief her final year. During residency, she nurtured her interest in maternal-child health and nutrition throughout the lifespan. She continues to work to understand the associations that exist between pregnancy, mother and child by studying prospective and retrospective cohort data and developing a postpartum weight loss program
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Erica Spatz, MD
Yale University
Erica Spatz, MD is an internist who received her undergraduate degree in human and organizational development at Vanderbilt University and her medical degree from Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. Dr. Spatz completed her internal medicine residency and a year as chief resident at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Montefiore Medical Center after which she stayed on for a year as an academic hospitalist. She is interested in studying underrepresented populations (particularly Latino’s) with diabetes and obesity and the prevention of cardiovascular disease in this group.
Dr. Sussman is an internist who received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College. He received his medical degree from UCSF and MS from UC Berkeley as part of the UCB/UCSF Joint Medical Program. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He is interested in how evidence-based medicine can be more practically applied in medicine and health care.
Kate Viola, MD received her undergraduate degree in architecture from Bryn Mawr College and her medical degree from Howard University College of Medicine. Dr. Viola is a general surgery resident at North Shore University Hospital. Her research interests include endocrine disorders in minority populations, primarily thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal disease; access to healthcare, stage of diagnosis, treatment type, family history, and analysis of surgical outcomes with respect to training.
Anje Van Berckelaer, MD University of Pennsylvania
Anje Van Berckelaer, MD (Family Medicine) is a family physician who trained at Harvard Medical School and the family medicine residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. She has recently worked in pediatric malnutrition and TB/HIV programs in sub-Saharan Africa with Médecins Sans Frontières. Her current research and advocacy interests are centered on access to health care and enrollment in public health insurance programs.
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Glenda Wrenn, MD University of Pennsylvania
Glenda Wrenn, MD (Psychiatry) received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and her medical degree from Jefferson Medical College. She completed her residency training in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania where she participated in the Clinical Research Scholars Program in Psychiatry. Her clinical and research interests include enhancing resiliency of communities, integrating systems of mental health care, developing effective systems to respond to mass trauma, and addressing health disparities in mental health access.
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Donna Zulman, MD
University of Michigan
Dr. Zulman (VA Scholar) is an internist who obtained her undergraduate degree in Human Biology at Stanford University, and prior to medical school she worked at the Institute for Health and Aging at UCSF, where her research focused on strategies to address the health needs of an aging population, including the effectiveness of long term care ombudsman programs. She received her MD from UCLA and completed her residency in internal medicine at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include chronic disease management, health and health care disparities, and approaches to improving care for older adults in the primary care setting.
