Amin Azzam, MD, MA, Resident Alum : Instilling a thirst for lifelong health care learning

Welcome to the trenches   

When Azzam was approached by UCSF’s Medical Alumni Association about mentoring a high school student from a community underrepresented in medicine, he immediately signed up to be paired with Noe Lopez, 17, a senior at Mission High School in San Francisco. “We are the inaugural pilot, just the two of us, for this proof of concept,” Azzam says. Lopez has shadowed Azzam, both at teaching and at clinical sessions, and the teen is researching brain tumors under his mentor’s guidance. “It’s cool that I’m comfortable with a doctor,” says Lopez, who is on track to be the first person in his family to attend college. “This mentorship definitely has reaffirmed my interest in the medical field.”

Student-led learning 

Azzam is so passionate about health professions education that he teaches at three universities – UCSF, UC Berkeley, and Samuel Merritt University – implementing his ongoing research into student-led learning. “What I love about teaching is the privilege and opportunity to help young professionals become the best version of themselves,” he says. His commitment to that work focuses both on best teaching practices and on expanding access to opportunity. It has led him to study topics like the use of artificial intelligence avatars in mental health training to give large student populations exposure to realistic scenarios to supplement and standardize their training. Azzam also teaches a class in writing for Wikipedia to improve public access to high-quality medical information.

From student to self-teacher 

“How do you help students be active thinkers rather than passive recipients of our knowledge?” he says. “If we help young health professionals learn to be lifelong learners, that is the environmentally sustainable fuel that will stimulate perpetual growth.”   

– Kira Goldenberg for UCSF Magazine