About
We created SAMPL in response to one big problem - the lack of diversity in medical leadership positions.
This includes doctors who have not traditionally held these positions - marginalized because of their gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, or family educational background.
The downstream consequences of this problem are devastating and far-reaching, ultimately resulting in persistent health disparities for underserved populations.
Diverse students often hear: “You should become a doctor so that you can go back and serve your community.” While this message is important, it neglects to tell you that filling leadership positions such as academic faculty, residency program director, department chair, or medical school dean, amplifies the positive change you would bring to your community.
The problem is, becoming a physician leader is not easy. In fact, becoming a physician, period, is not easy.
In addition to many years of hard work and dedication, it requires an enormous amount of resources, luck, support, and mentorship. It requires a strong sense of purpose and an unwavering desire to improve the lives of others. And often, it simply requires that you find a person or a group of people who truly believe in you.
We started by working one-on-one with diverse pre-medical students interested in leadership, helping with med school applications, providing advice, or connecting to healthcare exposure opportunities.
The stories we heard resembled our experiences. Some encountered discouraging pre-med advisors. Others felt lost as the first person in their family to navigate the pre-medical path. Many struggled to balance academics with the need to support themselves.
We soon learned that we could increase our impact by creating a mentoring network where every member serves as both a mentor and a mentee, such that we could use our collective experiences, resources and wisdom to support each other.
About Yana and Leo
Yana Vaks, M.D.
Yana Vaks grew up in Russia and came to the United States as a refugee in 1996. She majored in neuroscience at the University of Rochester (2003) and graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine (2008). She completed her pediatrics residency (2011), pediatric ICU fellowship (2014) and a research fellowship in healthcare delivery innovation (2014) at Stanford. She is a pediatric ICU attending at Kaiser Santa Clara, passionate about improving value in healthcare and changing the medical culture.
Leo Aliaga, M.D.
Leo Aliaga was born in Bolivia and grew up in Chicago. He started out an artist, studying photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2002). A transformative experience as a Spanish teacher in the Chicago Public Schools led him to medicine. He completed a post-bacc at Northwestern (2006) and attended the Pritzker School of Medicine. During medical school he was an HHMI-NIH Research Scholar (2010-2012). He graduated in 2013 and completed four years of neurosurgery residency at UCLA. He found a love for emergency medicine, switched specialties, and is an EM resident at UC Davis.