The SPIRIT of DOM Award

SPIRIT of DOM AwardAs part of our commitment to recognizing our highly dedicated staff and NFAs and increasing the visibility of their work, we established the SPIRIT of DOM (Service, Professionalism, Inclusivity, Responsibility, Inspiration, and Teamwork in the Department of Medicine) Award in 2017. This award aims to acknowledge staff members and NFAs who exemplify the UCSF PRIDE Values and make the DOM and UCSF a better place to work. Since the award's establishment, 34 awards have been given for excellence and commitment to the department.

For the spring 2023 cycle, the award committee received 36 nominations across all DOM sites, representing a wide variety of roles. The following individuals, appearing in alphabetical order, were selected to receive the award:

Winners

Jordan Cuby.

Jordan Cuby joined the Division of General Internal Medicine (DGIM) at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center as a Clinical Research Coordinator during the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2021. A native of Louisville, KY, he graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C, where he earned his BS in Psychology and went on to earn his MPH, focusing on community health education and social science, from the City University of New York, Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. 

In his role as CRC, he leads data collection for two research projects. Jordan manages the day-to-day operations, data collection, and communications among team members that include trainees, research staff, and faculty co-investigators. As the primary face of these studies, he is on the ground coordinating data collection with community partners and delegating tasks to the research team, conducting one-on-one interviews with participants experiencing homelessness, and coordinating the over 26 follow-up visits for each participant. Jordan’s ability to connect and engage with participants is credited with the high follow-up rates among a population that is hard to reach. Jordan is naturally gifted and outstanding in connecting with individuals who identify as being part of a gender and sexual minority group or have experienced substantial trauma from homelessness and/or substance use. His open, empathetic, and non-judgmental manner of communication are some of the primary reasons why participants have shared their experiences around substance use and homelessness and continue to follow-up. 

Jordan has been instrumental in resolving several roadblocks in research. For example, when the Tom Waddell clinic had to move recruitment and retention procedures outdoors to Civic Center Plaza during the pandemic, Jordan took the lead in implementing study procedure changes despite how challenging it was to conduct recruitment and follow-ups outdoors in an outdoor public space. He was able to initiate and maintain a clinic presence at the Tom Waddell clinic, which substantially increased PCP referrals to the study. He initiated the idea for posting QR code flyers in the Tenderloin, which helped support recruitment. He maintained a daily presence at the Civic Center Plaza study site, stayed late to meet with participants or met them over the weekend to provide them with flexibility to attend study visits at a time convenient to them.

Jordan has earned praise from clinic partners for his professionalism. He is emblematic of diversity, bringing with him experience as a Black/African American public health practitioner and community health educator who has made a career improving the health of underserved populations and as a professor of English language in Colombia who is bilingual in Spanish and English. Jordan is very much deserving of this award and represents the best of UCSF.


Gayle Kojimoto-HumeGayle Kojimoto-Hume is a program manager in the Division of Palliative Medicine (DPM), managing the UCSF MERI Center for Education in Palliative Care, UCSF Practice-PC: Interprofessional Education in Palliative Care Course, and other projects. She also co-facilitates the DPM's Antiracism Task Force. Before she joining UCSF as a career employee in 2004, she spent many summers interning in various departments at UCSF while still in high school!

As coordinator of the MERI Center, she helped lead the development of MERI from a focused education resource for the UCSF/Mount Zion campus to an international education center serving thousands of patients, family caregivers, healthcare providers, and staff annually.

In addition to her regular duties and with the changes occurring in response to Covid, Gayle takes extra initiative to support staff, fellow, and faculty well-being. She hand makes everyone in the division holiday ornaments, serves as a wellness representative with UCSF Campus Life Services, and also serves as a staff engagement ambassador.

Gayle is proactive, resourceful, and exemplifies true commitment in everything she does. In the midst of Covid, she led the consolidation of multiple in-person memorial events into the semi-annual, virtual UCSF Day of Remembering (DOR), where bereaved family and UCSF providers can come together to honor and remember UCSF patients who have died. She exemplified flexibility and versatility when she had to pivot to planning a remote event that the whole institution can participate in and not just DPM-related people. Hundreds now attend the DOR events each winter and summer. She coordinates readings, short talks, music, and rituals for this event, making it a meaningful experience for a very ethnically and religiously diverse group of attendees.

Gayle manages the MERI budget (more than $1.3 million) with the utmost integrity. She is careful to recognize donors, precise in monitoring and projecting budgets, and eminently trustworthy. She is working diligently to raise funding and obtain grants to carry on the important work of MERI. Recently, Gayle learned the intricacies of grant submissions, including producing budgets within the ethical and technical requirements of the University system.

Gayle serves as a co-lead of the DPM Anti-Racism Task Force. She takes initiative in leading the monthly meetings and promotes a safe and supportive space in which members can discuss sensitive topics. Within MERI, Gayle has led efforts to increase inclusiveness via a major revision of the MERI website and course descriptions, a revision of course content to be more equitable, and by promoting collaborations with GLIDE church and the Chinese American Coalition for Compassionate Care. Gayle’s expertise in DEI is being built into new programs and research studies being developed by MERI.

Gayle is widely recognized by those she works with as one of the best administrators at UCSF. She is conscientious, committed to quality improvement, and is often asked to help other team members. The Division of Palliative Medicine entrusts Gayle to assume leadership of two key division education programs in recognition of her skills and competence. Gayle is emerging as a true leader.


Ivan Leung.

Ivan Leung joined the Division of Hematology-Oncology at ZSFG as a Clinical Research Coordinator in 2019. With a focus on serving the needs of diverse patient populations, he is dedicated to promoting health equity and delivering compassionate and culturally concordant care. In his role, Ivan has contributed to over 20 investigator-initiated, cooperative group, and industry-sponsored clinical trials spanning various cancer anatomical sites. In addition to his research responsibilities, Ivan also serves as the administrator for the ZSFG Liver Tumor Board, is a member of his division’s DEI committee, and is a co-facilitator of the Mindfulness Group Medical Visit at the Osher Center of Integrative Health with Dr. Chloe Atreya and Dr. Kavita Mishra.

Ivan has been an outstanding and exemplary research coordinator. He often stays late to ensure patients are able to access clinical trials and follow study procedures, attends clinic visits with patients, even when not required by the study, to make sure that patients understand treatments and risks for side effects, and has been an advocate for all the patients he cares for, especially helping to raise clinical issues which might have gone unnoticed by other providers. His childhood growing up in Hong Kong and fluency in Cantonese has been incredibly useful both in helping patients understand the risks and benefits of clinical trials as well as in providing cultural competency to both patients and providers, helping to bridge large cultural gaps that exist in healthcare for patients in the study team. 
 
In just his first year, working with a team from the Osher Center for Integrative Oncology, he successfully accrued dozens of ZSFG inpatients to a study of acupuncture for cancer-related pain, jumpstarting the research program and showing that therapeutic cancer research can be successfully carried out at ZSFG. He then took on a study of nivolumab, a novel immunotherapy, combined with radiation therapy for nasopharyngeal cancer, a type of cancer that predominantly affects patients from East and Southeast Asia. With his strong work and dedication, multiple patients were accrued to this trial, making a demonstrable contribution to the study as a whole, and for this he earned an authorship spot on the publication which has a strong potential to change the standard of care for these patients. All the patients accrued to the study were Cantonese speaking and Ivan’s dedication and support were instrumental in providing less toxic and potentially life-saving therapy to these patients. 
 
Personally, Ivan is warm and caring, funny and easygoing, and an excellent team player. He effortlessly pivots to cover colleagues who are out sick and clearly enjoys mentoring and tutoring newer CRCs. He is diligent and thorough in his work and is genuinely committed to helping patients with cancer access the most cutting-edge research available. As a senior CRC he continues to grow, taking on multiple new responsibilities including multiple regulatory responsibilities, which has greatly sped up study activation for the team. Outside of research, he has taken an active role on the division’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team, bringing his own perspective on the value of diversity and helping drive the agenda, and has volunteered in the Cantonese-speaking Cancer Awareness Resources and Education (CARE) patient support group at ZSFG.
 


Nancy Tran

Nancy Tran has been at UCSF since 2006, starting out in the Department of Medicine, in the Division of General Internal Medicine as a Residency Coordinator, then in the Division of Infectious Diseases as Fellowship Coordinator, then in the Division of Gastroenterology as HR and Operations Analyst, and then as Administrative Supervisor in the Department of Pathology before returning to the Department of Medicine in 2019. She joined the Division of Nephrology in 2019 and supports the Renal Transplant Service as the Kidney Transplant Unit (KTU) Administrative Officer. 

Nancy has taken on additional responsibilities to oversee the KTU in all aspects related to clinical revenue management, clinical operations, faculty hiring, appointments, and departures, and collaborates with each medical director to strategize long- and short-term clinical goals and visions for the KTU. Faculty appreciate Nancy’s detail orientation in projecting faculty statements and clinical wRVU expectations for each KTU faculty. The organization and accuracy in projecting wRVU totals and clinical expectations for each provider allows KTU faculty members to focus more intently on patient care.

On top of the continued pandemic which has had its own challenges, there has been a lot of change in the KTU. The unit is recruiting a medical director for the Kidney Transplant Service as well as more faculty members to fulfill patient care needs in KTU.  Nancy has taken control of those recruitments on top of her extremely busy full-time job. The medical directorship is an extremely high-profile position and the recruitment has endured many changes in direction and is still ongoing. She has worked long hours and forgone vacation to try to continue to provide superior service to her doctors’ day-to-day needs as well as work on these very hard recruitments. She meets and interviews all the candidates as well as orchestrates their meetings with a variety of faculty members with difficult schedules. 

Nancy always works at the highest level of professionalism but does so very warmly. She works with a very diverse and challenging group of faculty and has spent time learning each of their personalities and work styles and has adapted to their needs. She always maintains calm and never loses her cool. Nancy always goes above and beyond to produce a top level product.