2022 Fall: The Struggle is Real: Breaking Barriers that Limit Student Success

Calvin Chou, MD, PhD is Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, and staff physician at the Veterans Affairs Health Care System in San Francisco. After undergraduate work at Yale, he received his PhD in microbiology and his MD at Columbia University, and subsequently completed residency training in internal medicine at UCSF. As Senior Faculty Advisor for External Education with the Academy of Communication in Healthcare (ACH), he is recognized internationally for leading workshops in relationship-centered communication, feedback, conflict, and remediation in health professions education. Currently he is director of VALOR, a longitudinal program based at the VA that emphasizes humanistic clinical skill development for medical students. He also held the first endowed Academy Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at UCSF. He has delivered communication skills curricula for providers at health systems across the country, including Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Stanford Health, New York Presbyterian, AdventHealth System, Wake Forest, and Texas Children’s Hospital, and internationally as well. His research interests include assessment of curricular developments in clinical skills and clinical skills remediation, forces influencing feedback in health sciences education, and enhancing humanistic communication for interprofessional trainees. A member of the UCSF Academy of Medical Educators since 2002, he has received numerous teaching awards at UCSF, including the Henry J. Kaiser Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Inpatient Setting, and two of ACH’s national awards, the 2019 Healthcare Communication Teaching Excellence Award, and the 2018 Lynn Payer Award for outstanding contributions to the literature on the theory, practice, and teaching of effective healthcare communication and related skills. He is co-editor of the books Remediation in Medical Education: A Midcourse Correction, and Communication Rx: Transforming Healthcare Through Relationship-Centered Communication.

Jason Walker, PhD is an associate professor of physiology at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine South Georgia campus. In addition to teaching physiology lectures, he serves on the Medical Education Center of Osteopathic Excellence as the Director for Student Progression and Off-cycle Curriculum where he works with students across all three PCOM campuses who are struggling with the adjustment to the course load of medical school. In addition to working with students toward academic success, he also conducts research on heart rate variability and burnout in medical students and investigates the role of imposter syndrome in underrepresented minority medical students.

Dr. Michael Redinger is an Assistant Professor at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine (WMed). He is dually appointed in the Program in Medical Ethics, Humanities, and Law, for which he serves as Co-Chief, and the Department of Psychiatry. The Program in Medical Ethics, Humanities, and Law directs the WMed undergraduate and graduate medical education curricula in the topics of medical ethics, medical humanities, health law, and health policy, provides clinical ethics support to the two partner health systems of WMed, and advances bioethics, medical humanities, and medical jurisprudence research. He is the medical director for the WMed outpatient psychiatry clinic. He also serves as the current Young Physician Section representative on the Michigan State Medical Society Board of Directors and as the Inaugural Unit Head of the WMed Unit of the International Network of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics.

His myriad research interests include clinical ethics, psychiatric ethics, religion and medicine, Catholic health care ethics, and medical professionalism. He has been published in CHEST, The American Journal of Psychiatry, The American Journal of Bioethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, and the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, as well as popular media. He also has given a number of international and national presentations.

Prior to joining the faculty, Dr. Redinger served as the Chief Resident in the Department of Psychiatry at WMed. Prior to arriving at WMed, he completed a dual MD/MA in Bioethics and Health Policy with a Concentration in Catholic Health Care Ethics at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics. He is a proud alumnus of the University of Notre Dame and a native Idahoan.

Dr. Harada graduated from Brown University in 1996, and, after a year of living in Bolivia teaching in an orphanage, began her medical education at the Yale School of Medicine, graduating in 2001. She completed an internal medicine residency and two-year geriatrics fellowship at the University of Chicago. She currently works as a geriatrician at University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, providing care to older adults with complex syndromes such as falls, polypharmacy, and dementia. She is also Assistant Dean for Community-Engaged Scholarship and in this role, she oversees the medical school’s health equity curricula, service learning, and Learning Communities program. She has a husband and two children, and her pronouns are she/her/hers.

Lauren Parker is a Student Affairs Professional at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, specializing in academic coaching, faculty development, and learner professional development for a longitudinal, tri-campus learning community program. With 10+ years of student affairs experience in the medical education setting, Lauren is academically focused on student success best practices in the areas of academic progression, learner well-being, and professional identity formation.

Janet Coffman is a Professor of Health Policy at Healthforce Center, the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is also Co-Associate Director for Policy Programs at the Institute for Health Policy Studies. Over the past 25 years, she has authored numerous publications on the health care workforce in California and the United States, including multiple analyses of strategies for increasing racial/ethnic diversity in the health professions. She has also conducted evaluations of multiple health workforce initiatives aimed at increasing racial/ethnic diversity and geographic distribution of health professionals. Professor Coffman received a Master’s in Public Policy and a PhD in Health Services and Policy Analysis from the University of California, Berkeley.