Alumnae Reflect on Bay Area Project

Dr. Yasmin Bains, DO Class of 2021 and MSMHS Class of 2016, served as a Fellow from 2019-2020 alongside Dr. Hiroe Imai Hu, DO Class of 2020.

Bains and Hu partnered with two youth-centered organizations in the East Bay to use the methodology of Community-based Participatory Research to assess the mental and emotional health needs of Asian American adolescents.

They co-created a curriculum that empowered Asian American adolescents to take charge of their own mental and emotional wellbeing through a culturally informed lens.

Project sites were The James Morehouse Project in El Cerrito, which focuses on the city’s high school community, and The Spot community youth center in Oakland, operated by Asian Health Services.

“Our project was really focused on creating a program and a curriculum that focused on the wellbeing of youth, and specifically Asian American youth in the community,” Bains said.

Program Continues to Inspire Past Fellow

Their Schweitzer project grew from work Bains and Hu did to establish what’s now the Wellness, Academics, Resilience, and Mindfulness (WARM) curriculum on the TUC campus that’s designed to help medical students balance their development as a physician and a person.

They set out to learn the factors that influenced the overall wellbeing of youth who were first- or second-generation immigrants, what it means to have for youth to have their own identity, but also how that identity intersects with their community, family and peers.

That involved a three-step process:

• Partnering with the appropriate youth-based organizations and learning their needs.
• Sharing with them what Bains and Hu were thinking about to get their input on if there was a need for that or space for that within the community.
• Getting the youth involved through such things as focus groups with activities and mentorship. Bains describes these in-person focus groups as “quite powerful.”

Their project got far enough along before the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns that one of their project sites that had a few youth programs in place, adopted some of the curriculum into their activities.

“That was great because the piece that we were really thinking about was sustainability,” Bains said. “It was really nice to be able to have part of what we had created from our learnings to be adopted into a program that was already in place.”

Bains and Hu each said their participation in The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship’s San Francisco Bay Area Fellows Program informed their careers into and through residency, their practice, and for Bains, her role as an Assistant professor of Clinical Sciences and Community Health within TUC’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, and for Hu, her role as a Clinical Research Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health and a community Psychiatrist at a bilingual, cross-cultural private practice serving Japanese and broader Asian American patients.

“I take the lessons I learned with me everywhere I go, any project I take on, and even with my patient encounters,” Bains said.

The importance of meeting the needs of our youth remains a key driver for Bains.

“Engaging with youth is one of the most powerful projects I have taken on. The understanding and learning that has come from this experience is inspiring,” Bains said. “As we’re thinking about the future of our communities, it is absolutely essential to engage with our youth and to provide mentorship and coaching, because they are our future.”

Bains and Hu said they are excited for the opportunity afforded to TUC’s three current Schweitzer Fellows to learn what it means to put together a robust service project, work with other Fellows who are interprofessional, and to benefit from the network of the program’s Fellows for Life.

All three are DO students in the College of Osteopathic Medicine.

“It was one of the most important lessons in my career to learn how to build something from the ground up that can ultimately improve the health of individuals and communities,” Hu said. “The creativity, logistical planning, team building, and community engagement skills that we learned are something that still helps me to this day in my current work in both clinical practice and biomedical research.

“It was also a nice excuse to spend more time with Dr. Bains as she is one of the greatest human beings I have ever met, and I always learn what it means to be a team player from her,” Hu said.

Schweitzer Projects for 2026-2027 Span Adolescent to Senior Health

Student Doctor Ashley Cao is partnering with Superstar Health Education and Solano HEALs to provide destigmatized, culturally competent sexual and reproductive health education to adolescents and young adults through workshops and peer mentoring sessions at schools and youth-centered organizations in Solano and Contra Costa counties.

Student Doctor Gabrielle Chan is partnering with various senior centers and nonprofits across the Bay Area to implement educational health talks on Advanced Care Planning, which aim to increase completion rates of advance directives by providing clarity on their utility and safe spaces to discuss end-of-life care.

Student Doctor Jenna Levin is partnering with 4^th Second, a Vallejo-based youth development organization, to improve menstrual health equity and body literacy through a community workshop series in both English and Spanish that aims to drastically shorten the diagnostic delay for conditions like endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, and fibroids, delays which disproportionally affect communities of color.

Cao, Chan, and Levin join more than 250 prior Schweitzer Fellowship recipients who have provided more than 51,500 hours of service to the most vulnerable communities of Northern California since 2007, according to the organization’s website.

The Fellows partner with more than 150 community-based organizations in eight Northern California counties to help address a wide variety of unmet health needs by creating and carrying out yearlong projects with direct service at their core.

Bains said it’s important for Fellows to get to know their partner organizations to ensure the goals of the Fellow’s project meet the organization’s goals and values.

“Aligning a community project with the mission and priorities of the community organization makes the partnership mutually meaningful. You may have an excellent project and idea, but if it does not align with the goals of the organization, then it can be really hard to fully execute your project,” Bains said. “And think about sustainability and who, potentially at the organization, might be willing to take on that project and sustain or grow it.”

TUC Produces Impressive List of ‘Fellows for Life’

Touro University California has had strong representation among the ranks of Schweitzer Fellows since the program’s inception. Past Fellows include:

• 2025-2026: Destany Michael, DOc 2028, MSMPH 2024, MPH 2023; Pooja Mhatre, DOc 2028; Beatrice Ojekunle, DOc 2028, MSMHS 2024
• 2024-2025: Caroline Auxier, DOc 2027, MSMHS 2021; Tristan Dickinson-Hiatt, DOc 2027; Dr. Janna Yang, DO 2025
• 2023-2024: Dr. Kendall Gardner, DO 2026; Dr. Shivali Joshi, DO 2026; Dr. Grace Lara, DO 2025; Dr. Catherine Nguyen, DO 2026
• 2022-2023: Dr. Svitlana Eckmann, DO 2024; Dr. Michelle Nguyen, DO 2024: Dr. Colburn Yu, DO 2024
• 2021-2022: Dr. Shradha Biradar, DO 2022; Dr. Jessica Mitter Pardo, DO 2022
• 2020-2021: Marganick Bien-Aime, Dual MSPAS/MPH 2022
• 2019-2020: Dr. Yasmin Bains, DO 2021, MSMHS 2016; Dr. Hiroe Hu, DO 2020
• 2018-2019: Dr. Timothy Kim, Dual DO/MPH 2022, MSMHS 2017; Dr. Katherine Ku, Dual DO/MPH 2021
• 2017-2018: Dr. Katherine Yu, Dual DO/MPH 2019
• 2015-2016: Dr. Martha Benitez, Dual DO/MPH 2018; Dr. Tyler Fleming, Dual DO/MPH 2018
• 2014-2015: Dr. Melissa Belec, Dual DO/MPH 2018
• 2012-2013: Dr. Soaman Dizechi, Dual DO/MPH 2016
• 2011-2012: Dr. Jennifer Tran, DO 2014
• 2009-2010: Dr. Michael Herndon, DO 2010