Awards serve many purposes, including well-deserved recognition to those whose accomplishments have advanced our missions and bring honor to our school and our profession. Just as importantly, awards serve to inspire others to take the same journey to achieve similar success. Awards also inspire mentors in their roles as guides to the younger generation so that mentees can maximize their potential, achieve their personal best, and have impact on their community and the world. Mentorship is an important value in our department and at UC Health that we actively seek to nurture and encourage. Nothing makes a mentor more proud than seeing a mentee achieve success, including receiving an award – it is positive recognition of a job well done for both the mentor and the mentee.
For all these reasons, I want to share the accomplishments of our awardees. I hope that you feel as proud as I do to have such wonderful graduates from our school who chose pathology as the specialty to share their talents and create impact. They are truly an inspiration.
Nationally, Dr. Gandour-Edwards is a past chair of APC's Undergraduate Medical Educators (UMEDS) group, initiating development of national pathology competencies for medical students, as well as a joint project to create genomic pathology teaching cases for medical students, a national curricular resource necessary to prepare physicians of the future. She established the first joint educational session between UMEDS and the residency program directors group, bridging the levels of medical education to address the important issue of evaluation of pathology curriculum for medical school accreditation. Recognizing the growth of new medical schools, Dr. Gandour-Edwards led outreach to newly-accredited schools, increasing UMEDS membership and attendance by 30%.
Dr. Gandour-Edwards continues to have national impact on medical education. As the long-standing Councilor for UCD's AOA Medical Honor Society, she was appointed two years ago as Councilor Director to the national AOA board. She is also a member of the United States Medical Licensing Examination Test Material Development Committee. To learn more about Dr. Gandour-Edwards, please see her on-line bio.
A 1993 graduate of our medical school, as well as a graduate of our residency program in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Dr. Galvez was one of the first trainees to complete UC Davis Health's medical informatics fellowship program, a training program which we are now re-establishing as an accredited fellowship within our department. Dr. Galvez began his career here at UC Davis Health as assistant professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Director of Bioinformatics and developed the UC Davis' Health Informatics Program, supported many national-level efforts such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI)-sponsored Mouse Models of Human Cancer Consortium, and served as a member of that group's Image Archiving Committee. While at UC Davis, Dr. Galvez created many innovative tools eventually used as a model by the NCI, including the Visible Mouse, which he developed for UC Davis' Center for Comparative Medicine's Mouse Biology program. Dr. Galvez later became Senior Clinical Informaticist with the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute's Center for Biomedical Informatics, providing senior-level assistance to the Program Director, building their then-emerging clinical trials management system. Before taking on his current role at BTRIS in 2016, Dr. Galvez was the Program Director of the National Cancer Institute's Clinical Translational Informatics program, where he helped create and manage a portfolio of all NCI-funded clinical trials, and guided many scientific collaborations, including the United States-Latin American Cancer Research Network in partnership with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay. To learn more about Dr. Galvez's career and work, please see his on-line bio.
I hope that you will join me in extending congratulations to our outstanding alums. I also congratulate everyone at UC Davis Health – after all, it is our community of faculty, staff, and housestaff who together provide the expertise and the supportive learning environment that enable our graduates to become award-winning stars who improve lives and transform health care.