Each September, the American Medical Association (AMA) recognizes influential female physician leaders as part of Women in Medicine Month. To showcase the accomplishments of these leaders, the AMA Women Physicians Section (WPS) and the AMA Foundation have announced the winners of the 2019 Joan F. Giambalvo Fund for the Advancement of Women research grants program.
The Joan F. Giambalvo Fund for the Advancement of Women Award is administered by the AMA Foundation on behalf of the AMA Women Physicians Section. The AMA-WPS and AMA Foundation awards scholarships of up to $10,000 to health care researchers to identity and address issues that affect women physicians and medical students.
“This project was born in part by personal experiences of each of us as early- to mid-career women physicians, but also motivated a lot by the larger empowerment movement for women in medicine,” said Tiffany Leung, MD. “Among us, we’ve experienced a diversity of issues, challenges and successes, whether because of our gender, race, relationship status, and the social contexts in which we work and live. But there are commonalities among our stories and those are the stories and learnings we want to explore with other women too.”
The AMA-WPS and AMA Foundation have granted 27 research awards since 2006 on topics such as flexible work options, gender differences in the practice patterns of obstetricians/gynecologists, and the promotion and retention of diversity in medical education.
One of the winning 2019 projects focuses on “Gendered differences in medical students’ sense of belonging in Orthopedic Surgery: A multi-institution study.” It will be led by two women from Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, Cara Cipriano, MD, Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery, and Kate Gerull, a fourth-year medical student.
“I’m excited for this opportunity to help the field of orthopedic surgery and its efforts to improve gender diversity,” said Cara Cipriano, MD.
The second winning project, “Women Physicians in Transition: Learning to Navigate the Pipeline from Early to Mid-Career,” will be led by Tiffany Leung, MD, MPH, assistant professor of faculty of health & life sciences at Maastricht University. The team also includes Sima Pendharkar, MD, MPH, Division Chief of Hospital Medicine at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Icahn School of Medicine in New York; Angie Chen, MD, Medical Director of the Primary Care Chemical Dependency Clinics and clinical assistant professor of primary care and population health at Stanford University; Tammy Lin, MD, MPH., Voluntary Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego; and Karen Wang, MD, Assistant Professor of the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine.
The AMA has adopted numerous policies aimed at encouraging medical associations and other relevant organizations to study gender difference in income and advancement trends, by specialty, experience, work hours and other practice characteristics, and develop programs to address disparities where they exist. The AMA will continue to strongly support equity and diversity across medicine and promote professional growth and development for physicians at every stage of their careers.
