Track: Adult Categorical
Medical School: Stanford University
Residency: Stanford University (General Surgery)

Carlie grew up in rural Pennsylvania. She completed her Bachelor of Science in Human Biology, Health, and Society at Cornell University, studied Human Sciences at the University of Oxford, and worked in quality improvement at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard School of Medicine. She moved to California in 2015 where she completed her medical degree at Stanford School of Medicine with concentrations in Community Health and Global Health and stayed on at Stanford Healthcare for General Surgery Residency. During her professional development years of residency Carlie completed Certifications in Culinary Arts and Plant-Based Nutrition as well as a Master of Science in Community Health and Prevention Research with a concentration in Applied Contemplative Science. During her time as a medical student and resident, Carlie has focused on caring for underserved populations in California, South Dakota, Alaska, Guatemala, Ecuador, China, Nepal, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe. She is passionate about health equity, education, and mentorship as well as the intersection of surgery with culinary, lifestyle, and palliative medicine. She loves cooking and eating good food, being outdoors in nature, and traveling, especially with her husband Rana, rescue dog Roxie, and family and friends.

What is the best piece of advice you've been given?

-Walk to the beat of your own drum. 

-If you can be anything, be kind. 

​​

Track: Adult Categorical
Medical School: UCSF
Residency: UCSF (Psychiatry)

Alan was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He attended Yale for college, where he majored in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He spent two years living in the Middle East, including a year of disability advocacy work after college at the AlManarah Association in Nazareth. During medical school at the UC Berkeley-UC San Francisco Joint Medical Program for medical school, he trained as a hospital chaplain for one summer (the origin of his interest in palliative care), co-coordinated the student-run free clinic, and wrote a master’s thesis on the experience of illness among the Jews of medieval Egypt based on a trove of Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts known as the Cairo Geniza. He stayed on at UCSF for psychiatry residency (the acronym U Can Stay Forever turns out to be true). In his final year of residency he is serving as chief resident for education and completing the psychoanalytic psychotherapy training program at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He hopes to build a career at the interface of palliative care and psychiatry, focusing both on patients with serious mental illness and bringing a mental health lens to the care of all patients. He feels very lucky to have lived in San Francisco for almost a decade and is still finding new things to love about the Bay Area. He enjoys reading, running, knitting, learning languages, and building community over food and hospitality.

What is the best piece of advice you've been given? A few weeks into college, I was feeling quite overwhelmed and socially anxious and didn’t know how to make friends. An upperclassman told me, “It’s very simple, even if you barely know someone you just have to wave enthusiastically and greet them warmly.” It worked!

Track: Adult Categorical
Medical School: OHSU
Residency: UCSF (Emergency Medicine)

I was born in San Francisco and grew up in both San Francisco and Oakland, CA. My first exposure to medicine was as my mother’s birth partner when I was 14, which inspired me to serve the women in my community as a young adult. As a volunteer Doula and Health Educator at a women’s health clinic, I spent many years advocating for patients/clients in complex medical environments and creating safe spaces for them to be heard and healed. My journey at UCSF started as an Emergency Department volunteer and shortly after as an ED patient care technician. I spent the next seven years integrating people’s stories and emotions into how I cared for them. While working in the ED and volunteering, I completed a post-baccalaureate program at San Francisco State University and took a short break from UCSF to start medical school at Oregon Health and Science University. After spending the last four years as a resident, I’ve watched my peers suffer and felt myself crumbling into pieces at various times throughout training. We spent endless hours working hard to provide compassionate and comprehensive care to our patients, and oftentimes, we were left with zero energy to care for ourselves, let alone each other. These tough times have cultivated my passion to develop better ways to nurture and heal myself. My own healing has improved my ability to slow down, hold space for others, and walk alongside my patients on their own healing journey. I believe that medicine can be more humane, not only for our patients but especially for healthcare workers, and I want to be an agent of that change. Everyone deserves to be whole, and it has become my personal mission to nourish the vitality of as many people as I can.

When I’m not at work, I find joy in traveling and eating my way through any city I’m in, spending quality time with my family, teaching myself new things, reading, meditation, cooking new recipes, and all adventures.

What is the best piece of advice you've been given? We are all human. Everyone makes mistakes. We all deserve to love and be loved.

Track: Adult Categorical
Medical School: UCSD
Residency: UCLA (Family Medicine/Geriatrics)

Niousha is originally from Tehran, Iran, and grew up in Los Angeles. He completed his undergraduate studies at UCLA, followed by medical training at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. After an Internal Medicine internship at UC San Diego Medical Center, he worked in public and global health with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Committee of the Red Cross. He later completed a year of Psychiatry training at USC and his Family Medicine residency at UCLA Medical Center. He then completed a Geriatric Medicine fellowship at UCLA, followed by an NIH T32 Research Fellowship in Aging at UCSF. Niousha’s research examines how resilience, social context, and inequity influence symptom burden, function, and quality of life, and he ultimately hopes to build a career as a clinician-researcher and educator in geriatrics and palliative care. He also volunteers as a forensic medical evaluator for asylum seekers through Physicians for Human Rights.

Outside of medicine, he enjoys old films, music, learning the cello, writing poetry, photography, baking, hiking with his dog, and participating in the Healer’s Art.

What is the best piece of advice you've been given? “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”—Kahlil Gibran & “You are your best thing”—Toni Morrison

Track: Adult Categorical
Medical School: OHSU
Residency: UCSF (Internal Medicine)

Audrey was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, in a Vietnamese immigrant household. She graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Biochemistry and a minor in Music. Before medical school, she conducted research in stem cell and genome editing at Boston Children’s Hospital. She attended Oregon Health & Science University for medical training, where she also completed a master’s in clinical research before joining UCSF for Internal Medicine (IM). In residency, Audrey was an active member of the Wellbeing Committee and coordinated the inaugural Parnassus ICU Patient Memorial and the IM residency talent show, Bob-a-palooza. Audrey plans to pursue a career as a clinician-educator in palliative care, with academic interests in well-being, grief processing, and the intersection between musical therapy and medical humanities. In her free time, Audrey is either cooking new recipes or writing songs. She’s currently producing an album to capture the difficult-to-articulate emotions often experienced in medicine.

What is the best piece of advice you've been given? "It is the quality of our work that determines its value, not its scale. Excellence is needed everywhere, at every scale, because a telescope is a very poor microscope, and you cannot sail across [the lake] in an ocean liner. On the scale of our individual lifetimes, the most vital work we do may be the work of being people—friends, collaborators, and mentors.”

- Marjorie Cantine, my college government president

Track: Geri-Pal
Medical School: The University of Chicago
Residency: UCSF (Internal Medicine)

Noam completed medical school at the University of Chicago and internal medicine residency (UC Primary Care track) at UCSF. Prior to medical training, she was a psychiatric case worker in the Boston South End. Her academic interests include philosophy, ethics, dementia care, end-of-life decision-making, and medical education. She enjoys road tripping, exploring national parks, cooking without recipes, and hanging out with her black lab.

What is the best piece of advice you've been given? Follow the joy.

Track: Pediatrics
Medical School: UCSF
Residency: UCSF (Pediatrics)

Joshua grew up in southern Maryland and received his undergraduate degree just outside of Baltimore at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He moved across the country to attend medical school at University of California, San Francisco, during which he pursued medical education research focused on how to best teach trauma-informed care to resident physicians so that they could thoughtfully serve patients from all walks of life. Joshua remained at UCSF to complete pediatric residency, where he came to appreciate how both trauma-informed care and palliative care center the stories of patients and their families. As a palliative care pediatrician, he hopes to advocate for patients by learning what matters to them most and honoring those values while guiding patients and their families through a complex medical system. Outside of the hospital, Joshua enjoys laughing with his loved ones, reading, and spending time with music – whether it’s listening, writing, playing, or belting it out at karaoke.

What is the best piece of advice you've ever been given? A high school classmate’s yearbook quote, probably taken from elsewhere, has stayed with me: “Most people listen with the intent to reply, when it is often more important to listen with the intent to understand.”