When UC Riverside School of Medicine student Pamela Muñoz received the call that she had won a 2026 Herbert W. Nickens Medical Student Scholarship, she didn’t believe it at first. “Knowing that I was able to win something like that felt so surreal,” she recalled.
Her win marked the second year in a row that a UCR SOM student has received the scholarship, an annual award from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) that recognizes five third-year medical students across the nation for their work to promote quality health care access for underserved populations. Each student will receive $5,000 and attend Learn Serve Lead 2026: The AAMC Annual Meeting in Anaheim, CA in November.
“Our mission aligns well with the Nickens award because we're looking for folks that are going to make a difference in our local communities,” said Danny Teraguchi, EdD, executive associate dean for Student Affairs at the UCR SOM. “Two years in a row, we've nominated students that have demonstrated that their entire life. It's very personal to them that they're making an impact in the communities that they reflect and that they come from.”
A shared mission
Each medical school can only put forward one student for the scholarship each year. Teraguchi said that Muñoz stood out because of her initiative and her commitment to the region. “That's the kind of person Pamela is--she doesn't just see an issue, she enacts it,” he said. “A lot of applicants are just beginning their career of doing things when they come to med school, but… even as a first- and second-year medical student, she had already done so much.”
During her first year at the SOM, Muñoz served as co-director of the Coachella Valley Free Clinic, a student-run clinic serving her home region. She focused on restructuring the clinic, including improving wait times, increasing patient volumes, recruiting an ophthalmologist to offer appointments, and creating a program to help meet unique community needs by giving free glucose monitors to patients with diabetes. “A lot of them are farm workers that don't have time to stop working and prick their finger, so these continuous monitors are helpful for them,” Muñoz said.
For Muñoz, working at the clinic was personal. As a first-generation student whose parents didn’t complete high school, she and her family received health care from free clinics at their church when she was growing up. Drawn to science and physiology, Muñoz majored in neuroscience at UCLA and participated in an undergraduate medical mission trip to Costa Rica. “The joy that I found speaking to these patients in Spanish about their medical concerns made me feel a sense of happiness and belonging, and it made me realize that this is what I can see myself doing,” she said. “That was why I decided to pursue medicine.”
Muñoz learned about the UCR SOM through participating in the Future Physician Leaders Program, a UCR Pathway Program for Inland Southern California pre-medical students who are committed to improving health in the local area. The SOM’s mission to improve healthcare among underserved patients in the region drew her to apply. “I felt it would be an ideal program for me because it would allow me to do what I wanted to continue to do,” she said.
Throughout medical school, seeing patients at the Coachella Valley Free Clinic has reminded Muñoz of her own family. “I did have patients tell me that they felt very connected with me, and I think it's because I treated them as if I was seeing my parents, my family, my cousins, or my neighbors,” she said.
Muñoz’s commitment to the Latino community also led her to co-chair the Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA) chapter at the SOM during her first and second year of medical school. In her role, she helped increase student engagement and scheduled more frequent events. “The higher up you go into education, the more you realize that there aren't very many people that look like us and speak Spanish and that can offer that support to patients… so just being able to come together with like-minded people from similar backgrounds was rewarding for me,” Muñoz said. “Being away from home, it's harder to stay connected with your culture, and so finding those opportunities within higher education is a constant reminder of where I come from and why I'm doing what I'm doing.”
She also advocates for her community through serving as an alternate delegate for UCR with the California Medical Association (CMA), a professional organization that represents California physicians. Muñoz co-authored a resolution titled “Ensuring Equitable Access to Clinically Indicated Standardized Intelligence Testing for Black Students in Public Schools,” which is currently under review by the organization. She attended the CMA House of Delegates last year alongside physicians from across California, who came together at the event to vote on a range of resolutions affecting medicine and patients.
“Based on what she's done now, I can only see how much impact she's going to have as an individual,” Teraguchi said.
Work that matters
Muñoz is dedicated to continuing to serve her home of Coachella Valley throughout her career and dreams of someday opening her own internal medicine and pediatrics practice, complete with a mobile clinic to help farmworkers and unhoused individuals access care. “My whole life, my parents instilled in me the importance of community,” she said. “That community did a lot for me… and I'm just happy that I get to be in a position where I can help these people in any way that I can.”
Shorter term, she looks forward to accepting her award and sharing her mission at the Learn Serve Lead 2026 conference this fall. “These awards serve not only as recognitions but as reminders for us, and I think that people recognizing the work that you're doing is a motivator to continue going, and it's also raising awareness,” she said. “I'm hoping that through this, people hear my story and… will maybe think about seeing in what ways they can help out the Coachella Valley.”
“We're thankful for the scholarship because it allows our students to shine,” Teraguchi added. “A big part of medicine is that reinforcement and affirmation that what they're doing matters, not just in our context but nationally.”
