As UMass Chan Medical School continues to pursue a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community, robust approaches such as evaluating and improving departmental practices and building transformative relationships through mentorship are proving to have an impact as demonstrated through the work of the Department of Dermatology.
Faculty, staff and students have worked together to make progress, such as the capstone project by a recently graduated medical student focused on diversifying the skin condition photos on file for the department.
“A broad problem in dermatology is that a lot of our lecture slides had primarily Caucasian pictures in them and were not reflective of the community we care for,” said Riley McLean, MD, assistant professor of dermatology. Mark Tawadrous, MD’24, worked with Karen Wiss, MD, professor emeritus of dermatology, Leah Belazarian, MD, associate professor of dermatology, and Nikki Levin, MD, PhD, professor of dermatology, to update the department’s lecture presentation photos with images from an online repository of different skin conditions.
Another recently graduated medical student, Morgan Groover, MD’24, worked with the Diversity, Representation and Inclusion for Value in Education committee to update lectures that are given to medical students.
The department is also committed to mentorship to make a difference. Jillian Richmond, PhD, assistant professor of dermatology and one of 37 diversity liaisons serving across UMass Chan, has taken a lead in fostering those relationships. Through Dr. Richmond’s efforts, seven students she mentored have secured funding through the Dermatology Foundation and two have secured funding through the Lupus Research Alliance through their Diversity Research Supplement Award programs. Richmond also helps organize mentoring sessions with students from historically Black colleges and universities and other universities such as Morehouse School of Medicine and the City University of New York School of Medicine.
“These schools do not have home dermatology programs, leaving students without exposure to specialty-specific advising. The dermatology department serves as a home program for them for dermatology-specific mentoring,” said Richmond.
“One of the things that we are the proudest of is that this is not an individually driven thing. There are so many providers in our department who care about this and have done their own legwork to set up different opportunities and that comes through on our diversity engagement survey,” said Dr. McLean. The dermatology department scored favorably as a department that has embraced diversity, equity and inclusion work at UMass Chan in the diversity engagement survey.
Richmond credits her colleagues for helping to sustain relationships with Morehouse and CUNY students. Medical student Yuying Zhang worked to make peer mentoring possible and Vijaya Daniel, MD, a micrographic surgery and dermatologic oncology fellow, initiated a relationship between the UMass Amherst Minority Association for Premedical Students and the Student National Medical Association’s dermatology branch, where Richmond conducts mock dermatology residency interviews.
This model of engagement and relationship building with Morehouse and CUNY became the catalyst for UMass Chan’s Summer Learning Opportunity, a program that brings medical students underrepresented in medicine to UMass Chan for immersive learning.
Additionally, the department encourages the consistent unlearning of biases through its diversity book club and has set up the Maloney Endowment Fund to help defray the cost of learners from underrepresented backgrounds traveling to UMass Chan for clinical rotations. Richmond also established the Dermatology Research Fellowship Fund to help pay stipends to students from high school through medical school traveling to UMass Chan for dermatology research, which to date has supported 10 students.
