Current and Past Fellowship Projects | Change Now - Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

2024-2025

Medical & Graduate Education

Assessing Equity-Centered Approach to Graduation Awards Nomination and Selection Process

Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) /Center for Multicultural and Community Affairs (CMCA); Student Affairs

This project aims to assess the adoption of the equity-centered approaches and best practices developed in previous years and identify recommendations for all relevant medical student award categories.

Coordinating Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism (IDEA) Efforts Across Student Groups

Office for Diversity and Inclusion and The Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education

This project aims to provide a space for student group members to dialogue, dream, and design efforts to incorporate diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism (DEIA) into their programming and across student groups.

Planning for Challenging Norms Conference

The Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education

Challenging Norms is a non-traditional virtual conference promoting community, coalition-building, and skill development through rigorous and preliminary research, presentations, shared stories and experiences, and the successes and challenges of efforts. This project aims to plan for the 2025 Challenging Norms conference.

Collaborating with the Structural Competency Working Group

The Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education and Structural Competency Working Group

This project is a partnership between the Icahn School and the Structural Competency Working Group, with the aim of developing, disseminating, and publishing structural competency cases for various institutions across the country.

Designing the Advocacy, Social Justice, and Anti-oppression Thread in the Curriculum Redesign

Curricular Affairs and The Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education

As part of the new curriculum, the Advocacy, Social Justice, and Anti-Oppression (ASA) thread is designed to equip all students with the knowledge and skills they need to address social determinants of health and promote health equity for all patients, with a particular focus on the impact of racism as a social determinant of health. This project aims to continue the ASA thread integration into the ASCEND curriculum.

Disseminating Equity Audit Protocol

The Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education

As part of the Racism and Bias Initiative’s guiding coalition change targets, a protocol was developed and implemented to conduct an equity audit of select student facing policies and to track policies over time to determine if there is inequity. This project aims to design materials and capacity development opportunities to disseminate the equity audit protocol nationally.

GSBS Anti-racist Change Strategy Implementation

The Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education

The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences is committed to implementing strategic transformational change through the formation of the Graduate School Racism and Bias Initiative (gRBI) guiding coalition and partnership with The Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education. Building on the work of the previous cohort, this project aims to implement and track results of 2023-2024 Change Targets and participate in 2024-2025 target development and implementation.

2024-2025

Icahn School at Large Projects

Establishing a Sustainable Connection between Undergraduate Pre-Health Student Affinity Groups and the ISMMS

Admissions, MSTP

This project aims to create a lasting and beneficial relationship between undergraduate pre-health student affinity groups and the Icahn School of Medicine. Based on project deliverables generated in the first year of the project (2023-2024 cohort), the fellow will build relationships, establish a mentorship program, organize campus visits and collaborative events, facilitate connections to enrich research and clinical experiences, conduct professional development workshops, and develop a long-term sustainability plan in partnership with Icahn Mount Sinai Student Affinity Groups.

Expanding Access and Mentorship to MD-PhD training

MSTP, Admissions, Diversity Affairs, Office of Diversity and Inclusion/Center for Multicultural and Community Affairs

As part of ongoing efforts to diversify and strengthen the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), this project aims to enhance access to MD-PhD training by implementing an early outreach and recruitment strategy. The focus will be on engaging participants from community partnership programs and pathway programs within the Mount Sinai community.

Implementing a feedback loop mechanism

The Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education

As part of efforts to improve our work, this project aims to create a communication loop that will promote a culture of feedback by providing opportunities to listen, ask questions, test assumptions, and seek to understand the evolving social issues impacting our learning environment and identify ways to promote equity and justice.

Choose Your Own Project

This year, the Institute for Equity and Justice is pleased to support one “Choose Your Own” Fellowship Project that is:

Aligned with our mission to nurture a visionary community of students, staff, faculty and leaders who are committed to advancing exceptional clinical care and science that is free of racism and oppression in all its forms;
Designed to address a gap or concern related to our learning environment;
Achievable in 8 months (October – May); and
Innovative and doesn’t duplicate or compete with the current Racism and Bias Initiative’s change targets.

Selected Project:

Applying Anti-Racist Principles and Practice to the Development of Standards of Professionalism in Medical Education

This project seeks to bring a more robust focus on anti-racism to the working group’s processes and outcomes. Beyond the working group, this project seeks to also uplift conversations about professionalism in medical education among students, faculty, and staff in ways that focus on day-to-day experiences of professionalism outside of the higher-level formation, implementation, and assessment of professionalism guidelines. I believe that notions of professionalism are deeply tied to equity within medical education and that Mount Sinai’s innovation related to professionalism within and beyond the working group has the potential to embody an anti-racist process and practice in novel ways.

2023-2024

Medical Education Projects

Building a Mechanism to Track Equity in Policies

Medical Education

Developed a mechanism to track relevant equity audit data points to determine the extent to which selected policies are implemented and/or enforced equitably; collaborated with Student Affairs and Curricular Affairs to design and implement a new mechanism.

Coordinating Anti-Racist Strategies Across Student Groups

Office for Diversity & Inclusion

Co-planned and managed of anti-racist retreats for student groups, in coordination with the Office for Diversity and Inclusion/Center for Multicultural and Community Affairs, the Racism and Bias Initiatives of the medical and graduate schools, the Student Council URiSM Representatives, and other stakeholders.

Establishing a Sustainable Connection between Undergraduate Pre-Health Student Affinity Groups and the ISMMS

Admissions

Built relationships, established a mentorship program, organized campus visits and collaborative events, facilitated connections to enrich research and clinical experiences, conducted professional development workshops, and developed a long-term sustainability plan to support undergraduate students from historically excluded groups interested in pursuing medical careers.

ART in MedEd

Medical Education

Designed and implemented opportunities to sustain a community of practice among students, share project wins and developments with partnering medical schools, and promote and enhance engagement during the Challenging Norms: Uplifting Anti-Racist Work to Transform the Landscape of Medical Education conference.

Designing the Advocacy, Social Justice, and Anti-oppression (ASA) Thread in the Curriculum Redesign

Curricular Affairs

Participated in the ASA workgroup and partnered with an instructional design consultant to develop an ASA curricular map and relevant learning activities.

Equity in Student Awards

Student Affairs

Conducted a literature review on equity-centered practices, evaluated ISMMS current award selection process with an equity lens, developed an equity-centered framework and protocol for the 2024 graduation awards process.

RBI Student Sphere Leadership

Racism and Bias Initiative

Oversaw, facilitated, and monitored the change targets in the student sphere; developed and implemented a communication and outreach strategy to recruit students to participate in all RBI spheres, change targets, and activities such as Chats for Change; oversaw student involvement in Chats for Change; lead student involvement in envisioning, developing, and implementing Orientation; created and implemented a mechanism for getting feedback on change targets from students and student groups.

2023-2024

Graduate Education Projects

GSBS Strategic Anti-racist Change Target Development

Racism & Bias Initiative

Built on the work of previous fellows by leveraging data collected from the 2023 Data Walk to work with the GSBS Racism & Bias Initiative (gRBI) to finalize its first change targets, implement a plan using results-based accountability, and track the change over time.

“Choose Your Own” Awarded Project

Mitigating bioessentialism in the teaching of race vs. ancestry

GSBS and Medical Education

Completed curriculum covering the basic principles of biological essentialism and its application to conception, analysis, and dissemination of medical/scientific knowledge in areas of race and ancestry. Through facilitation and dissemination of foundational lectures, peer discussions, and practical workshops, the curriculum developed skills to critically appraise manifestations of biological essentialism in scientific literature, identify its instances in literature, and develop practical tools/resources to improve scientific literature.

2022-2023

Medical Education Projects

Situational Judgment Tests

Admissions

Reviewed the literature on situational judgment tests with a lens toward equity to understand how racism and bias may manifest or be mitigated by this assessment and mapped how the ISMMS attributes in successful candidates are measured using SJT.

Anti-Oppressive Curriculum Revamp

Curricular Affairs

Updated curriculum map with scaffolded content, including learning objectives and measurements/assessments; Collaborated with project supervisors to develop scaffolding framework, collected and assessed existing course content, identified content gaps, met with students/student groups to gather feedback and content requests, attended curriculum revamp meetings, attended meetings with pedagogy expert, presented work to curricular affairs and other stakeholders, etc.

Equity Audit

Medical Education

Conducted an Equity audit of 15 current student facing policies and created a planning document outlining how we will develop, implement/enforce and assess the impact/outcomes of policies to eliminate potential barriers.

RBI Student Sphere Leadership

Racism and Bias Initiative

Oversaw, facilitated, and monitored the change targets in the student sphere; developed and implemented a communication and outreach strategy to recruit students to participate in all RBI spheres, change targets, and activities such as Chats for Change; oversaw student involvement in Chats for Change; lead student involvement in envisioning, developing, and implementing Orientation; created and implemented a mechanism for getting feedback on change targets from students and student groups.

ART in MedEd

Medical Education

Sustained the community of practice among students and assisted in developing the capacity of medical schools to dismantle systemic racism and bias in their work and learning environments.

2022-2023

Graduate Education Projects

GSBS Anti-Racist Climate Mapping & Strategy Development

Racism & Bias Initiative

Generated a comprehensive review of past, current, and proposed anti-racist projects/work at GSBS; created a scheme understanding how to use the results of this review to inform the anti-racist transformational change priorities of the gRBI and future inaugural Guiding Coalition.

“Choose Your Own” Awarded Project

Mitigating bioessentialism in the teaching of race vs. ancestry

GSBS and Medical Education

Developed curriculum covering the basic principles of biological essentialism and its application to conception, analysis, and dissemination of medical/scientific knowledge in areas of race and ancestry. Through foundational lectures, peer discussions, and practical workshops, the curriculum developed skills to critically appraise manifestations of biological essentialism in scientific literature, identify its instances in literature, and develop practical tools/resources to improve scientific literature.

2021-2022

Medical Education Projects

Image Diversity

Curricular Affairs

Created a database collection of images of clinical conditions, with an emphasis on dermatological conditions, seen among Black and brown individuals.

Racist Patient Assessment

Curricular Affairs

Assisted in developing a facilitated formative assessment for navigating racist patient behavior for different levels of learners, ranging from first or second year medical students up to residents, fellows, and faculty.

Anti-Oppressive MEPO Assessment

Curricular Affairs

Developed a comprehensive list of existing assessment tools related to anti-oppression for the new Medical Education Program Objective (MEPO); identified best practices for assessment from the literature that could be used in our curriculum.

Equity in Admissions

Admissions

Assisted in developing the next faculty development retreat, and updated the Equity Handbook for the Admissions Committee.

Investigating Institutional Actions

Admissions

Assisted in investigating the state of institutional actions (IA) -- number, description, demographics of who gets them, admissions outcomes -- in the applicant pool; conducted a review of the literature to determine if bias/racism impact institutional actions.

Undergrad Database

Admissions

Created and maintained a database of URiM student organizations on undergrad campuses for admissions recruitment and outreach.

Equity-Based Policy Review

Medical Education (school)

Identified and collected existing equity-based policy review tools, protocols, and other best practices; determined their utility in the medical education environment; recommended an equity-based policy review strategy for MedEd to consider in the process of making, implementing, and assessing policy.

Appreciative Advising Evaluation

Student Affairs

Helped create a timely, valid, and transparent system for students to provide feedback around Appreciative Advising and the Office of Student Affairs: assist in implementing this system and ultimately analyzing the data.

RBI Student Sphere Leadership

Racism and Bias Initiative

Oversaw, facilitated, and monitored the change targets in the student sphere; developed and implemented a communication and outreach strategy to recruit students to participate in all RBI spheres, change targets, and activities such as Chats for Change; oversaw student involvement in Chats for Change; lead student involvement in envisioning, developing, and implementing Orientation; created and implemented a mechanism for getting feedback on change targets from students and student groups.