UCSF Geriatric Medicine Match Is Here and is Awesome

Eric Widera, M.D., Program Director of our UCSF Geriatric Medicine Fellowship welcomes our UCSF Geriatric and GeriPal Fellows! See his message below.

First a very big thank you to everyone who gave their time and expertise to be part of the admission committee for the fellowship and to interview all of our outstanding applicants.  It was one of the hardest years I’ve ever seen to be on the committee, as we had so many amazing candidates (I would take them all if I could).    And a very big thank you to Elaine Chow for always being the guiding force for the fellowship!   And without further ado, here are our incoming fellows (please feel free to email them with your congratulations):

Our Geriatrics Fellows are:

Lauren Lederle [email protected] :  UCSF sometimes can stand for “U Can Stay For” Life, and we certainly hope this is the case with Lauren (the most common question I get about her is when is she going to join us as faculty in the Division).   Lauren did her medical school training at UCSF as well as her IM primary care residency, and currently is a hospitalist at the VA.  She’s done several research projects with Sei Lee, and is interested research, education, and wellbeing (she also won the Alanna McKelvey Stone Compassion Award out of her residency class).  Her hobbies include backpacking in the Sierra Nevada, canoeing in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, conifers (I didn’t know that was a hobby), house plants, ukulele (Alex Smith, please take note), learning Spanish, reading in her backyard (soon that will include reading the GRS in her backyard).

James Deardoff [email protected] : “Wow! Just wow!” – those are the words that one faculty member told me after meeting James during his interview day.   James went to UCLA for undergrad, SLU for med school, and is now at Duke, where I remain slightly worried that Heather Whitson won’t let him leave on June 30th based on all the praise she had for James.   Interesting factoid about James – he taught himself how to use SAS so he could do a research project that he was interested in, and he has a first author list longer than mine!  The one thing he does need to work on is giving us some deets on his hobbies!

Richard Parenteau [email protected] :  Richard has been part of the UCSF family for some time, having done his MD/PhD training here and now short-tracking through internal medicine residency through the Molecular medicine pathway.  Richard will be the second Geroscientist and bench researcher in our fellowship, the first being John Newman (that’s a tough act to follow).  Richard has also done a ton of work at UCSF on diversity/equity/inclusion, a passion that we hope that he brings into the fellowship as well.  Richard’s hobbies include art (“especially really weird modern stuff”), music (“especially 90's love jams” which I don’t think I’ve heard Alex sing yet), dance (“especially Salsa/Merengue”), running, New Years resolutions, new adventures, and noodles.

Theresa Wong [email protected] : Wait, isn’t Theresa already a faculty member of our Division?  No.  It certainly feels that way with everything that she has done with us including working with Carla Perissinotto in Housecalls, Pei Chen on an education curriculum, and having completed a first-author publication in JAGS with Alex Smith.   Theresa did go to UCSD for med school, where she was the president of the geri interest group, also got an MPH at Berkeley during a break year (that’s the time she worked with Alex) and now is a IM primary care resident at UCSF.  Her hobbies include hand lettering, making greeting cards, backpacking, checking out new restaurants, baking cookies, and curating her cat's Instagram (Adi, looks like you have some competition in this category now.  Better watch out!)

And for GeriPal!

Lingsheng Li [email protected] : Lingsheng attended Johns Hopkins for her undergraduate studies an MPH, then attended the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. During medical school she did a research year at the NIH, studying palliative care needs in underserved populations and surrogate decision making in critical illness. She also participated in the MSTAR program at Hopkins, studying hearing loss and cognition.  She is currently completing her residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins, where she holds leadership positions in the palliative care interest group and the resident wellness committee. She enjoys travel (hopes to live in Kyoto for a year someday – Sandra, can you make that happen?), drawing and painting, is a collector of Grimm’s fairy tales (she has collected 15 different editions so far), and is on a quest with her husband to seek the best bubble tea in the world (if you got recs, send them her way!).