Content Authored by: Erika Klein

2023 Primary Care Summit Brings Together Local Medical Students to Explore Careers in Primary Care
The Inland Empire has a shortage of primary care physicians, but UCR’s Primary Care Summit aims to help change that. The event returned to campus on January 14, 2023 for the first time since 2020. Hosted by the UCR School of Medicine’s Family and Preventative Medicine Interest Group (FPMIG), the...
Building the Future of Medicine in Inland Southern California
For Jesse Romo, constructing UC Riverside’s new School of Medicine Education Building II has helped him contribute to improving medical care in the community. It has also held a more personal meaning for the labor foreman: working toward finding a cure for his daughter, who has lupus. “There's nothing her...

Standardized Patients’ Impact in Medicine
On any given day, Peg Winn and Cristian Palacios could be acting as patients in simulated medical scenarios or teaching specific topics and techniques to small groups of medical students. They fill similar educational roles at the UC Riverside School of Medicine, but their opposite backgrounds offer unique contributions to...

The Search for a Multiple Sclerosis Treatment in Riverside
There’s currently no effective treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS), but Seema Tiwari-Woodruff, Ph.D. , the director of UCR's Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program, may be well on her way to finding one. As MS attacks the body, it causes damage to the myelin sheath, the fatty coating around nerve fibers that...

High-altitude Researcher Applies Findings to COVID-19
What can people living in the mountains of Peru teach us about people dealing with COVID-19 related oxygen deficiency? Actually, quite a bit. High-altitude exposure leads to hypoxia, or low levels of oxygen in the body—a condition that’s present in COVID-19 and many other medical conditions. Erica Heinrich, Ph.D., an...

“Periods Shouldn’t be Painful”: Sharing Truths in Women’s Health
Gynecologist, surgeon, professor, researcher: Mallory Stuparich, M.D., an associate clinical professor in health sciences at the UC Riverside School of Medicine and the associate program director for the Fellowship in Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgery, fulfills many roles in her career. Yet in each of them, she seeks to increase both...

Increasing Access to Dermatology in the Inland Empire
T his piece is part of a series highlighting members of the School of Medicine’s 2022 graduating class. After growing up in Chino, CA and seeing the health disparities and lack of access to medical care in her community, Yasmin Gutierrez had a single-minded goal. “I just wanted to be...

Fulfilling his Purpose in Medicine
T his piece is part of a series highlighting members of the School of Medicine’s 2022 graduating class. When Matt Jason Llamas was five years old, he fell off a swing and hit his head on a brick. Knocked unconscious, he was rushed to the emergency department, where he underwent...

Learning About Health on TikTok
In a recent TikTok video, a young woman demonstrates curling her hair by holding it inside a public restroom hand dryer. The video cuts to Mutahir Farhan, a fourth-year medical student at the UC Riverside School of Medicine and owner of the TikTok account @madmedicine. “Yo, I hate to be...