Stanley Frencher will return to residency training in the Department of Urology at Yale University. Dr. Frencher and his community partners have put considerable thought and resources in place to sustain their work on outreach to African American men and prostate cancer screening education. After clinical training, he plans to pursue a faculty position in urology where he can continue an ambitious community partnered research agenda.

Adriana Izquierdo is negotiating a position with the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research (GIM/HSR) in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She was awarded a diversity supplement from the National Institute of Mental Health to continue her work on social networks and depression care management outcomes. She was also awarded $20,000 by the UCLA Center for Health Improvement for Minority Elders, which is part of NIA’s Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research, to support this work. Dr. Izquierdo’s long-term goal continues to be to work with Latino elderly and community organizations to make an impact on health and health care for underserved communities.

Sonali Kulkarni will serve as the Associate Medical Director at the LA County Dept of Public Health, Office of AIDS Programs and Policy. She will also be appointed at the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research (GIM/HSR) in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She will continue to pursue her research interests which focus on improving access to care for underserved populations such as patients with limited English proficiency and patients who have been in the correctional system. Specifically, she will continue to collaborate with GIM/HSR faculty on several projects including: survey data analysis of medically ill California prison inmates before and after release from prison to better understand their changing health status and health seeking behaviors during this transition; reports on the implementation of rapid HIV testing algorithms in the Los Angeles County Jail; and a review of universal HIV test and treat. She will also serve as a guest lecturer and mentor for the Community Based Participatory Research course, a core seminar of the UCLA RWJF Clinical Scholars Program curriculum, in the UCLA School of Public Health.

Rhonda Mattox is the Medical Director of the United Family Services, a non-profit organization that serves youth recently involved in the juvenile justice system in Little Rock Arkansas. Dr. Mattox continues to focus her research towards developing interventions aimed at reducing the stigma of mental illness among the African-American community. Specifically, she will continue to work with faith-based programs to improve African-Americans’ access to treatment and outcomes in mental health.

Sierra Matula returned to UCSF to complete her general surgery residency, where she will continue to pursue her focus on understanding barriers of access to care and improving access to quality specialty/surgical care for vulnerable populations. Her long term plans include an academic surgery career as well as policy and advocacy work at level of the American College of Surgeons.

Bergen Nelson was appointed as a Clinical Instructor at the UCLA Department of Pediatrics where she will have 80% protected time for research. Dr. Nelson will continue to work with partners at the Los Angeles Unified School District 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.

Dr. Nazleen Bharmal enrolled in the National Research Services Awards Program in the UCLA Department of Medicine. This will provide her time to complete the dissemination of her Clinical Scholars projects and to prepare manuscripts for publication in peer reviewed journals. During this time, she will also defend her dissertation on social determinants contributing to geographic disparities in life expectancy and obtain a PhD in Health Services. In the long term, Dr. Bharmal plans to develop and improve health infrastructures domestically and abroad.

Dr. Jamila Davison is seeking a position that combines her passion for policy change, community based participatory research, academic teaching, and clinical service. She is exploring combining academic appointments in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Emory University, the Department of Veteran Affairs, and Morehouse School of Medicine. Dr. Davison's long term goal is to design, manage, and evaluate programs that integrate medical, educational, and social services to improve the health of individuals and families in poor, urban neighborhoods. She is especially interested in studying the effectiveness of these initiatives, in order to develop evidence-based policy recommendations that address the problems of poverty.

Dr. John Gore joined the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle as Assistant Professor, where he will have a clinical focus on urologic oncology. His research focus involves studying issues of access to care and quality of care for patients with prostate and bladder cancer. He hopes to utilize his health services training to better understand the delivery of prostate and bladder cancer care toward the goal of translating this understanding into interventions that improve access and quality.

Dr. Anish Mahajan joined the faculty at the UCLA Division of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research. Dr. Mahajan has also been selected to the White House Fellows Program for the 2009-2010 cohort. He will spend one year in Washington working as special assistant on health policy in the Obama Administration. Dr. Mahajan's long term goal is to become an independently funded health services researcher who engages government agencies and community organizations in improving the health of vulnerable populations domestically and internationally.

Dr. Anisha Patel is continuing her training at the Institute of Health Policy Studies at the University of California at San Francisco to gain additional skills to help her translate research into policy change. This will allow Dr. Patel to achieve her long term goals of providing clinical care to underserved populations, using a community-based participatory approach to develop interventions to address disparities in obesity among youth, and translating research into actionable policy change.

Dr. Rashmi Shetgiri joined the faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as a Clinical Instructor in Pediatrics in the Division of General Pediatrics. She will continue her work in community-based participatory research focusing on adolescent resilience in Latino youth in Dallas. She will be a clinician-investigator who will spend the majority of her time doing community-based participatory research, while continuing to practice pediatrics and teach medical students and residents. Dr. Shetgiri's long-term goals include using community-based participatory research to design, implement, and evaluate multi-site, resilience-based youth development interventions for at-risk minority youth, and to successfully disseminate these interventions. She will continue to teach a new generation of physicians about the importance of the social determinants of health and community-based research and advocacy. She hopes to utilize her research, clinical, teaching, and advocacy skills to significantly improve the health and developmental outcomes of children and adolescents.

Dr. Arshiya Baig joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in the Department of General Internal Medicine as a clinical investigator with the main responsibility of expanding their program on community-based research. Her long term goals involve refining skills in community based participatory research to improve the health and healthcare of marginalized communities. Future project interests include evaluating, improving and designing community-based interventions in urban populations.

Dr. Kristina Cordasco is an Assistant Professor-In-Residence with The Veterans' Administration (VA) Greater Los Angeles Health System and The University of California, Los Angeles, with an adjunct appointment at RAND Health. In this position she will have 80% of her time protected for conducting health services research with vulnerable populations. In the remainder 20% time, she will perform clinical work as a general internal medicine physician with the VA. Her long-term goals are to develop expertise in, and funding for, community-partnered research focused on system-level interventions to support access to and quality of care for patients with low literacy, limited English proficiency, and limited healthcare resources.

Dr. Jason Fish joined the UCLA faculty as a clinical instructor. This position allows for 50% protected research time where he plans to work on a clinical quality improvement project, complete his CSP main research project on obesity under the guidance of Dr. Arleen Brown, and follow-through on his other CSP project on physician web-based education program under the guidance of Dr. Douglas Bell. The remaining 50% of his position will be devoted to resident education and patient care. He is most interested in academic general medicine focused on patient care, student and resident education, and quality assurance.

Dr. Ying-Ying Goh serves as the Director for Los Angeles Healthcare Options 2009, a Task Force of the California Endowment where she is working to develop recommendations for an integrated healthcare model in South LA. Along with her mentors Drs. Arleen Brown and Lenore Arab, she submitted a proposal to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a project called “Understanding the Role of a Changing Food Resource Environment and the Impact of Increasing Access to Healthy Foods through Supermarkets.” She is also working with Dr. Brown and a group led by Sylvia Drew Ivie in South LA to develop a Community Kitchen program, in partnership with Tesco, an international corporation opening neighborhood markets across the U.S. This group is currently funded by the California Endowment. This collaboration will enable the study of the impact of increasing access to fresh, affordable groceries on community well-being.

Dr. Corita Gruden is an Assistant Professor position at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine, in New York City. In her position as a clinician-investigator, she will spend the majority of her time doing health policy-oriented research, while continuing to practice emergency medicine and teach medical students and residents. Her long-term goals involve helping to transform health policy directly, both at home and abroad.

Dr. Veronica Meneses is doing another year of research fellowship in Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. She will also continue partnering with the Los Angeles Unified School District Division of Special Education on her projects. In addition, the fellowship will include significant experiences in community advocacy, medical education and patient care and provide her with the needed protected time to complete her RWJF funded projects. Upon completing this fellowship, Dr. Meneses will be seeking a general academic faculty position.

Dr. AnaClaire Meyer joined the faculty at San Francisco General Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco as a Clinical Instructor in the Department of Neurology as of July 2008. She will focus on her work in HIV neurology and will be spending most of the next two years working in Kisumu, Kenya with an organization called Family AIDS Care and Education Services (FACES) to develop a tool for use by non-physician health care workers to diagnose HIV dementia. FACES serves about 14,000 people with HIV in Western Kenya, about half of whom are on antiretroviral therapy. This is an important opportunity as Western Kenya has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world (around 30-40%). Dr. Meyer’s support for this work includes a Fulbright scholarship, and fellowships from the Fogarty Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Academy of Neurology.