Alumni Scholars

Elizabeth graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 2005 with an AB in Economics, a Certificate in Health Policy and election to Phi Beta Kappa. Following her graduation, Elizabeth worked as an associate consultant at Bain & Company and in the Emergency Department of the University of Virginia Health Center.

As a medical student, under the mentorship of William Meadow, MD, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics and Co-Section Chief of Neonatology, and Neethi Pinto, MD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Elizabeth has conducted research on the accuracy of care team prognoses regarding patient outcomes after hospitalization in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.

Elizabeth has served as the co-coordinator of the Washington Park Children’s Free Clinic, a student-run clinic for underserved children. She also serves as a member of the Pre-Clinical Curricular Review Committee, charged with reviewing the first two years of the medical school curriculum.

Dr. Rhinesmith is a pediatrician at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC.

Lainie Friedman Ross, MD, PhD, is the Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Medical Ethics; Professor, Departments of Pediatrics, Medicine, Surgery and the College; Co-Director of the Institute for Translational Medicine, and Associate Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Clinically, Dr. Ross is a primary care pediatrician at The University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital and provides inpatient care of newborns in the Mother-Baby Unit.

Dr. Ross earned her undergraduate degree in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University, her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and her doctorate in philosophy from Yale University. She trained in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Ross’ research portfolio concentrates on ethical and policy issues in pediatrics, organ transplantation, genetics, and human subjects protections. She has published four books and over 200 articles in the peer-reviewed literature. Her fifth book, The Living Donor as Patient was funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Award in Health Policy and will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. She is currently writing a 6th book examining the ethical issues related to siblings in health care that is funded by the National Library of Medicine. She is a frequent lecturer both nationally and internationally and actively involved in teaching ethics to trainees and staff at the University of Chicago Medicine.

Dr. Ross has served on a wide range of professional organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Bioethics, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Ethics Committee, the International Pediatric Transplantation Association Ethics Committee, the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP) and the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC).

Dr. Ross was a 2014 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a 2015 recipient of the American Academy of Pediatrics William G. Bartholome Award for Ethical Excellence.

As of January 2023, Dr. Ross is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics at The University of Rochester.

Dr. Rossi-Foulkes is an experienced general internist and pediatrician with expertise in transition care and medical education. She has extensive experience with student and resident curricular development and evaluation, inter-professional education and collaboration, practice management and quality improvement in primary care training. Since 2006, Dr. Rossi-Foulkes has been the Program Director of the University of Chicago Med-Peds Residency program. Her excellence in quality improvement was recognized in 2007 with the Department of Medicine Excellence Award in Clinical Care and Education. She was inducted into the UCM Academy of Distinguished Medical Educators in 2009. In 2017 Dr. Rossi-Foulkes was awarded the UCM inaugural Program Director of the Year award from the Graduate Medical Education Committee. She was an advisor to the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics in developing their training courses for the Illinois Healthcare Transition Project and has also been on the Illinois Department of Public Health Immunization Advisory Committee since 2005. Nationally, Dr. Rossi-Foulkes is on the Transition Care Committee for the Med-Peds Program Director’s Association, and she was elected to serve four years as the national Secretary-Treasurer for that organization. Dr. Rossi-Foulkes has conducted workshops and been invited to lecture on medical education, quality improvement, and transition care for local, regional and national conferences.

As of November 2022, Dr. Rossi-Foulkes is Director of the Primary Care Track at Cedars-Sinai Health System in Los Angeles, CA.

Alex graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 2009 with an ScB in Neuroscience. Following his graduation, Alex coordinated the construction of a community clinic in Bamako, Mali.

As a medical student, Alex researched the extent of false fluency in the health care setting as part of the Health Care Disparities course, and he has continued to explore potential solutions related to the lack of translation services. He also has conducted research with Benjamin Van Voorhees, MD, MPH, on the economic feasibility of an online adolescent depression prevention intervention.

Over the course of his first year, Alex helped conceive of a children’s illustrated book — combining information on the flu with artistic illustrations — to expand health literacy for children. He and his fellow students received a grant from the University of Chicago’s Arts/Science Initiative to fund the book’s initial publication and distribution.

Alex spent the 2013-14 academic year abroad in London where he completed a masters of science in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Alex conducted research on the effectiveness of interventions during humanitarian crises.

Dr. Ruby is an Emergency Medicine physician in El Segundo, CA.

Maria completed her undergraduate studies Washington University in St. Louis, receiving a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Biology. In college, she developed her passion for working with Latinx communities through her work at Casa de Salud and at Nurses for Newborns. After graduation, María spent a year in Guatemala working with an NGO that promotes health and educational equity for individuals with disabilities. She then embarked her Global Health Corps fellowship at Community Pediatric Programs of Montefiore in the South Bronx, where she worked to facilitate access to medical care and legal services for children and immigrants.

In medical school, María was the Chair of the Dean’s Council, serving a liaison between school leadership and the student body. She also served as co-president of the Latinx Medical Student Association. In this role, she supported various COVID-19 relief efforts for Spanish speaking communities in Chicago, and launched an anti-racism reading program for incoming first year medical students. Under the mentorship of Dr. Julie Chor, she is conducting an interview study to understand the experiences of LGBTQ individuals with the first pelvic exam. To honor her service, María was selected as the 2020 Valerie Bowman Jarrett Scholar in Medical Education. María is now a resident physician at The University of California – San Francisco.

Yasmin Sacro is an outstanding junior clinician-educator who’s been named as a Core Faculty member for the University of Chicago Internal Medicine residency program, based on her superior clinical skills and teaching abilities. She sees a high volume of adult primary care patients and is known by patients as an outstanding clinician. Yasmin teaches residents in the Primary Care Group and also at Community Health — the community-based free clinic, where she’s taking the lead on developing curriculum for residents about providing care in this underserved and very challenging setting.

As of 2015, Dr. Sacro is a physician at Denver Health in Colorado.

Robert graduated from Yale University with a BA in the History of Science, History of Medicine. Following his graduation, he was selected as a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Public Policy Fellow in Washington, D.C., where he served in the U.S. Senate in the office of Senator Barack Obama and in the health policy office of Senator Ted Kennedy. After completing the fellowship, he began work as a health policy analyst for the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States.

As a medical student, Robert is the co-coordinator of Community Health Clinic, a volunteer-run clinic on Chicago’s west side. He also serves as the Admissions Chair for the Student National Medical Association, and sits on the Pritzker Dean’s Council as class representative to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Under the mentorship of Monica Peek, MD, MPH, he completed his research paper “Shared Decision-Making Preferences and Behaviors of Hispanic and non-Hispanic White Patients with Diabetes,” which earned Honorable Mention for Excellence in the Pritzker Summer Research Program.

Dr. Sanchez is an attending physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

Dr. Sargis is an Assistant Professor in the Section of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism. He completed his MD/PhD at Rush University before coming to the University of Chicago for his Internal Medicine and Endocrinology training. Rob’s clinical interests focus on diabetes, obesity, and lipid disorders, and in taking care of these patients, he places a strong emphasis on patient empowerment in effecting lifestyle change. In addition to seeing patients, Rob has an active research lab that studies the connections between environmental pollutants and metabolic diseases in hopes of generating sound scientific support for the development of public policy aimed at mitigating the deleterious effects of environmental contaminants on human health.

As of 2016, Dr. Sargis joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Dr. Sharma is a medical oncologist and clinical pharmacologist who focuses on the development of novel therapies for patients with all types of cancer, and gastrointestinal cancers in particular. His research involves computer-based modeling and simulation using data (including patient-reported outcomes) from oncology clinical trials. The broad objective of this research is to improve the development (by informing clinical trial design) and use of anticancer therapies. He has designed and conducted clinical trials that involve genotype-guided dosing of chemotherapy and repurposing of old drugs (such as sirolimus and metformin) as potential anticancer therapies. He is also using model-based phenotypes to develop genomic prediction tools for response to anticancer therapies. In an educational capacity, Dr. Sharma has an interest in improving doctor-patient communication with respect to informed consent for phase I cancer clinical trials.

Dr. Sharma is now a physician at the Cancer and Hematology Centers of Western Michigan.

Dr. Holly Shiao is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Emergency Psychiatry. She has a special focus on Psycho-Oncology, providing care to cancer patients both in hospital and clinical settings. She is also an attending on the Consultation/Liaison Psychiatry service.

Dr. Shiao attended medical school at John P. and Kathrine G. McGovern Medical School at the University Health Science Center at Houston. She then completed a General Psychiatry residency at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, followed by a Consultation/Liaison fellowship at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Shiao is interested in the benefits of mindfulness and supportive psychotherapy for patients. She also teaches and serves as a mentor for the residents.

In 2020, Dr. Shiao joined the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA.