Questions and Answers

2011 Champions of Health Professions Diversity Award Honorees

Charles J. Alexander, Ph.D.

Q: What led you to pursue a career in the health professions?

A: As a child, our family doctor was a Holocaust survivor, and every time I saw him he shared a little bit about his life. He always talked about getting all the knowledge that you can – because your brain is your most important asset. He was the first person that impressed on me the importance of education. Later on, I met a pediatrician who was the first African American doctor I had ever seen. I was impressed and thought: maybe I can become a doctor.

In college, I started off as a pre-med major. I worked in a hospital emergency room as an admitting clerk during the four-to-midnight shift on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, which are the worst times in an emergency room. This experience really changed my ideas about medicine. I still wanted to be involved, but I didn’t want to do it at that level. That’s when I decided to focus on health promotion and training programs – and ways to motivate other people to pursue health careers.

Q: What is the main challenge that the Academic Advancement Program seeks to address?

A: Of the freshmen at UCLA, 80 percent of them declare a major in a science area. The challenge is, by the time they’ve finished their first year, many have changed their major away from the sciences. By the time they finish, four or five years later, the percentage of students majoring in a science area drops to almost 20 percent. We’re losing students somewhere along that pathway.

Q: How did you decide to focus on undergraduate students?

A: When I worked as an admissions director at UCSF, I saw that fewer than five percent of the dentists and maybe eight percent of the physicians were from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds. Every year, I would see the same numbers in the applicant pool. There were no dramatic increases and, in some years, the percentages decreased.

We published a study about a year ago that showed ethnic and racial minority students may not do as well academically, but they do as well or better than white students in completing gateway courses. That was startling to me. I realized that I needed to figure out another way to address the problem of low numbers entering graduate health programs. While working at a professional school, my primary purpose was to help students already enrolled, rather than students with the potential to get in.

That’s when the opportunity to work at UCLA arrived. Almost a third of UCLA’s undergraduate students are from low-income, first-generation families – and 82 percent of them graduate and go on to successful careers. To me, this was fertile ground to develop the talent needed to increase the number of students with racial and ethnic minority backgrounds in the health profession applicant pool.

José Ramón Fernández-Peña, M.D., M.P.A.

Q: When did you first come up with the concept for the Welcome Back Initiative (WBI)?

A: I am an immigrant myself and was trained as a physician in Mexico and Spain. When I came to the United States, I did a master’s program in health policy and management. After graduation, I started working with the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. My last job there was at Bellevue Hospital in New York in the early 1990s. Many of my colleagues were also immigrant physicians working not as practitioners, but in administrative positions like me. We wondered what we needed to do to relicense. Where do we go? How much does it cost? How long does it take? We wanted to re-enter the health workforce in the actual capacity in which we were trained. So the idea started cooking in my head.

Q: Was there an experience that led to the actual formation of WBI?

A: I came to California in 1994 and started working with a San Francisco community-based clinic called Mission Neighborhood Health Center. We needed staff for a series of programs requiring specific skills and cultural backgrounds to be effective with the populations we served.

People came in and applied for positions as health educators, social workers, nutritionists, physicians and nurses. The applicants lived in and knew the community – and shared its values and beliefs. They were perfect – bilingual, bicultural – except they lacked the U.S. licenses that would allow them to do the work. We had all these assets in the community and we were turning them away because they didn't have that piece of paper that would allow them to work for us. I realized then that we had to do something about this.

Q: What opportunities do you see in diversifying the health care workforce?

A: There is incredible opportunity in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. In order to make the dream a reality, we’re going to need a workforce that is simply not there in terms of numbers and cultural and linguistic diversity. If we are going to be able to cover an additional 35 to 40 million people in health services, we’re going to need thousands of new health professionals that no school is going to be able to produce in the next three to four years.

There are thousands of foreign-trained health professionals living in America. With adequate support and guidance, we can fairly quickly integrate them into the U.S. health workforce. Not only do they bring to the field their professional skills, but also their diverse cultural backgrounds and multilingual abilities.

John T. Matsui, Ph.D.

Q: Please describe the students that participate in the Biology Scholars Program (BSP).

A: Our students don’t benefit from a family history of higher education. They don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. They come in less prepared to meet the expectations of the university than their peers. By the time of graduation, though, our students exit with biology degrees and University of California GPAs equivalent to, or exceeding, the GPAs of the student body at large.

The national average acceptance rate for medical school applicants is 50 percent. At Berkeley, we have a 55 percent acceptance rate. My students get into medical school at a rate of 85 percent.

If given the right environment, students from these underrepresented backgrounds are resilient with the will, ability and tenacity to excel. We look for ways to help them achieve their goals.

Q: Why is this work meaningful to you?

A: I grew up in the flats of West Berkeley. My family didn’t have a history of higher education. I really felt like an outsider, especially in high school. Most of my friends did not go to college. I was plenty smart, but the way they were teaching me wasn’t the way I learned. I was one of those back-row kids, an outsider, somebody who didn’t really fit in. I knew I was interested in learning science, but the system and I just didn’t get along. It was a bad fit.

So when I look out at my class here at Berkeley, I look for the back-row kids. I look for the students who feel uncomfortable and don’t fit the profile of a student who succeeds in science. Eighty percent of my students are first-generation, low-income students with backgrounds similar to my own. I knew I had potential then, and I see the potential in them now.

Q: What is the greatest challenge in running BSP?

A: The greatest challenge is finding funding sources that we can use to support program infrastructure. Most funders want the money to go directly to the students; I understand that. But, given these hard budgetary times, public funding for program operations is declining. It is really hard to find funds to pay for a sufficient level of staffing.

BSP isn’t just about research opportunities, internships or academic support. It's about relationships. These relationships – not only among the students but also between the staff and students – are lifelong. To have the money to fund staff who are not only professionally qualified, but also personally committed to the work, is really critical.