Three members of the campus community will be awarded on Monday with the Chancellor's Award for the Advancement of Women.
This annual award recognizes exceptional efforts toward the advancement of women at UCSF beyond the scope of an individual's job, area of research or student training.
Awardees are chosen for excelling in one or more of the following: elevating the status of women on campus; improving campus policies affecting women; participating in career or academic mentoring for women; generating and disseminating knowledge on women's health through research, teaching and public presentations; and/or advancing the admission, recruitment, retention and upward mobility of women at UCSF.
This year's awardees are:
- • Jane Koehler, MD, professor in the Department of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases
- • Rosalie Gearhart, the program director at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center
- • Aruna Venkatesan, a fourth-year student in the School of Medicine
The campus community is invited to attend the ceremony when Chancellor Mike Bishop, MD, will present these awards on Monday, March 24, from noon to 1:30 p.m. in Toland Hall on the Parnassus campus. The ceremony coincides with UCSF's celebration of Women's History Month.
Jane E. Koehler
Koehler, who receives the award for a faculty member, is recognized as an outstanding clinician and teacher. She also is an internationally recognized bench researcher studying the bacterium Bartonella. Because of her successes in research, teaching and patient care, Koehler has served as a tremendous role model for young, aspiring female physicians and as a mentor to fellows and junior faculty.
In response to the frustrations expressed by faculty regarding lack of information and guidance and the subsequent loss of junior women faculty, Koehler co-chaired development of the first formal mentoring program for all junior faculty in her department that included a series of workshops and a handbook on career advancement, faculty resources, FAQs and other advice to serve as a guide for new and junior faculty. These departmental junior faculty workshops have since continued on an annual basis.
In 2004, Koehler was appointed to the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on the Status of Women (CACSW) and immediately became the chair of the Faculty Subcommittee. When the chair of CACSW had to step down in February 2005, Koehler took her place and served as chair until the end of the 2006 academic year. Acting far beyond the usual scope of her CACSW duties, she chaired a career mentoring workshop for junior women faculty in January 2006 that was considered a great success and was attended by more than 250 women faculty.
Koehler continues to be involved in improving campus policies affecting women, helping to develop a junior faculty retreat, and working on issues such as child care coverage for the faculty attending professional meetings, research funds for junior faculty women and a small innovation fund to improve the campus climate for women faculty.
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Rosalie Gearhart
Gearhart receives the award for a staff member. As the program director and administrative nurse at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC), Gearhart has helped MAC grow into one of this country's foremost dementia clinics and research centers.
A strong advocate of gender equality among nurses, physicians, psychologists, fellows, students and research assistants, Gearhart focuses on attracting exceptional young women to careers at UCSF. Cognizant of gender issues during the hiring process, she goes out of her way to recruit and, more important, retain qualified female applicants.
Gearhart promotes a flexible work environment for mothers, developing individualized plans for maternity leave and the early years of motherhood. Her protégées have included women of all ages, from teenagers to seniors looking for new opportunities to contribute to society, and they now make up more than half of the employees at the center.
Gearhart is well aware of the challenges that women face, both in the workplace and as primary caregivers to patients in the MAC. Not only do MAC patients tend to rely heavily on female caregivers, many of the patients there are female, as women are more likely to be affected by dementia, the focus of research and treatment at the center. Gearhart has helped to organize conferences, outreach programs and support groups geared toward these women.
In addition, she co-sponsored a particularly successful and far-reaching initiative to bring awareness of issues related to dementia to African American women. In partnership with the Links, Inc., an international nonprofit organization of professional African American women, she trained women to conduct Alzheimer's disease awareness programs in African American communities. This helped to ensure that they have access to all the services and research that Alzheimer's disease centers across the United States have to offer.
"This is how things get done: women talking to women and offering helpful suggestions about vital issues that affect their families and their communities," Gearhart says.
Gearhart also gave women in the African American community the opportunity to voice concerns and issues that are specific to elderly and their caregivers in their own communities, so that these issues may be taken into consideration and ameliorated by clinicians and advocates in the MAC.
"I look forward to continuing to work to earn this recognition and celebrating all the women here at UCSF and beyond who work selflessly around issues we care about: family, health, education and peace, in particular those who champion the rights of older women."
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Aruna Venkatesan
Venkatesan, a fourth-year medical student, receives the award for a student/resident/postdoctoral scholar. Since her first year at UCSF, Venkatesan has devoted herself to raising awareness about domestic violence among health care professionals.
Working with the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF), she developed a comprehensive listserv uniting health professional students and faculty across the United States on domestic violence health care reform, created a campus organizing folio for students and faculty to facilitate national domestic violence curricular reform and activism, and worked collaboratively with leaders from the American Medical Student Association to organize national campus events as part of Health Cares About Domestic Violence Day.
As a 2005 curriculum ambassador for the School of Medicine, she revised the existing domestic violence syllabus, created an independent learning module on rape and sexual assault, and incorporated web-based tools for health care providers and students into the online course website.
In 2006, Venkatesan was the principal organizer of the UCSF conference and elective course titled "Patients and Providers: A Partnership to End Violence." This one-day conference addressed issues of violence, including child abuse, teen dating violence, sexual assault, elder abuse, intimate partner violence, violence in immigrant communities, violence in the LGBT community, violence in the homeless and international violence. Attended by numerous students and health care providers from different health science disciplines, the conference included keynote speakers, panel discussions, community-based media displays, targeted breakout sessions and a survivor panel.
Venkatesan has been invited to present at numerous conferences, most notably "Ending Domestic Violence and Human Trafficking in the 21st Century," an international conference at which she was the only student speaker and served on two panels. Since 2007, Venkatesan has been the only student committee member of LEAP (Look to End Abuse Permanently), an organization committed to facilitating effective domestic violence assessment and management in the health care setting.
When asked about her passion for domestic violence activism, Venkatesan replies, "I do this work because I think it is a fundamental right for every human being on this earth to live in a household where they feel safe. If women don't feel safe in their own homes, and fear the very people who should love them the most, how can they live from day to day - let alone thrive and be healthy?"
Venkatesan's research endeavors, with Rebecca Smith-Bindman, MD, as her mentor, involve characterizing patterns of prenatal screening for chromosomal abnormalities and, through a project that won her the 2005 UCSF Dean's Prize in Research, evaluating the predictive value of specific mammographic findings in breast cancer detection.
