Principles

R. Richard (Rick) Coughlin, MD, MSc

Richard Coughlin is a Clinical Professor of Orthopaedics in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at University of California, San Francisco. He works at San Francisco General Hospital, the county hospital for trauma and the indigent of the city and county of San Francisco. He has been a champion for overseas volunteerism and involvement since 1988 with the establishment of the orthopedic division of Operation Rainbow, a non-profit which offers free orthopedic surgery to children, with his private practice partner Taylor Smith. After joining the faculty at UCSF, he founded the first formal overseas rotation for orthopaedic surgery residents’ in the Transkei of South Africa in 1999. Dr. Coughlin completed his master’s degree in ‘Public Health in Developing Countries’ at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2004. Dr. Coughlin was awarded the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Humanitarian of the Year Award, which is given to one surgeon world-wide annually, for care of disadvantaged populations both at home and abroad.

Richard Gosselin

Richard Gosselin is a native of Montréal, Canada. He attended Collège André-Grasset for his undergraduate degree in Health Sciences. After graduating from college, he attended the University of Montréal Medical School, where he obtained his M.D. degree in 1979. He finished his Orthopaedic Surgery training at his medical school alma mater in 1984. Post residency, he completed a series of Orthopaedic Surgery fellowships: Musculoskeletal Infections in Senegal, Pelvis and Acetabular Surgery in Paris, and Orthopaedic Trauma at the San Francisco General Hospital-UCSF. He served as an Attending at SFGH from 1988-1991, and after pursued some international relief opportunities through the Red Cross. He later settled on his private practice in Merritt Island, FL where the focus of his clinical practice was Trauma and Joint Replacement. In 1999, he retired from his practice to pursue additional training as a public health scholar at the UC-Berkeley School of Public Health (MPH, 2001), and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (MSc, 2002). Ever since, he has been a Lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Public Health. His hobbies include traveling, photography, reading, and wine tasting. He has worked in over 40 different developing countries.

Harry Jergesen

Harry Jergesen graduated from Harvard College in 1968 and received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1972. He completed two years of general surgery residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and a residency in orthopaedic surgery in the Combined Harvard Orthopedic Residency Program. He was chief resident at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. In 1978, he was appointed assistant director of Rehabilitation Engineering Research and Development at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where he now serves as chief of Orthopaedic Surgery. In addition to his work at the Veterans Hospital, Dr. Jergesen works as an attending arthroplasty surgeon in the UCSF Arthritis Center where he specializes in surgery of the hip and knee.

In addition to participating in medical missions to Central and South America, he is active in the orthopaedic section of the UCSF Global Health Sciences Program, designed to promote academic ties with UCSF and medical schools in developing countries and in providing care in underserved areas in our country.

Executive Members

Ted Miclau

Ted Miclau was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale College in 1984 and received his medical degree from Yale School of Medicine in 1988. He completed his residency in orthopaedic surgery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1994. During his residency, he spent nearly one year at the world-renowned AO Research Institute in Davos, Switzerland studying fracture healing. The work resulted in two separate research awards given by the American Orthopaedic Association. After finishing an orthopaedic trauma fellowship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas in 1995, he was awarded the AO-Jack McDaniel fellowship, given to one U.S. orthopaedic residency graduate per year with an interest in orthopaedic trauma. During this fellowship, Dr. Miclau studied for several months in three prominent trauma centers in Europe: St. Gallen, Switzerland; Hannover, Germany; and Berlin, Germany.

In 1996, Dr. Miclau joined the faculty of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, (UCSF) as an orthopaedic traumatologist at the San Francisco General Hospital, (SFGH). In 2000, he received a five-year Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health to study the role of angiogenesis in fracture repair. This was the first such award given to an orthopaedic surgeon in a decade. He also received the first-ever Career Development award from the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation. In 2001, Dr. Miclau received tenure at UCSF. Dr. Miclau was also the recipient of two prestigious traveling fellowships given by the American Orthopaedic Association to a handful of promising young academic orthopaedic surgeons: the North American Traveling Fellowship (1997; five-week tour of medical centers throughout the U.S. and Canada) and the American British Canadian Traveling Fellowship (2001; six-week tour of medical centers throughout the U.K. and South Africa).

In 2002, Dr. Miclau became the Acting Chief of Orthopaedic Surgery at SFGH, and subsequently became the Chief of Orthopaedic Surgery at SFGH in 2004. He was also named Vice Chairman and Director of Orthopaedic Trauma of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UCSF in 2003, and was named the Acting Chairmain of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery this year. He serves on many local and national committees, editorial review boards and grant-review panels. Over a 5 year period, he was Chair of the Research Committee of the Orthopaedic Trauma Association. He has published over 75 research papers and 10 book chapters. He is an internationally recognized expert on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of bone regeneration and repair, locally applied antibiotics, and minimally-invasive fracture surgery.

Saam Morshed

Saam Morshed, MD, MPH is a senior orthopaedic surgery resident at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.  He is a graduate of Harvard University (BA ’96), the UCSF School of Medicine (MD ’01), and the School of Public Health (MPH ’05) at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB).  He has international health and leadership experience in Latin America and the Middle East as a funded research fellow through UCSF and as a volunteer for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.  He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in epidemiology at UCB and his interests include clinical outcomes research and global academic exchange relating to orthopaedics and traumatology.

Teo Nissen

Teo Nissen, MD attended the University of California-Berkeley where he graduated at the top of his class, and then he went on to pursue his medical degree (with AOA distinction) and residency in Orthopedic Surgery at UCSF. He pursued a fellowship in Sports/Trauma at Lake Tahoe Orthopaedic Institute. He is now a Staff Orthopaedic Surgeon at St. Lukes, with a clinical faculty appointment at SFGH. Dr. Nissen’s main interests are bringing high-caliber orthopedic services to medically indigent and underserved communities.

Steve Pinney

An expert in orthopedic surgery, Dr. Stephen Pinney serves as chief of the UCSF Foot and Ankle Service. His research interests include clinical problems related to the foot and ankle, as well as educational strategies for teaching patients, medical students and residents.

Pinney earned his medical degree from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He completed his residency training in orthopedic surgery and a fellowship in sports medicine at the University of British Columbia. Subsequently, he completed a fellowship in foot and ankle surgery at the University of Washington's Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Pinney serves as course director for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons' Course for Orthopaedic Educators. He has previously served as chairperson of the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society's (AOFAS) Medical Training and Post-Graduate Education Committee.

In addition to doing clinical practice and research, Pinney has an interest in medical education. "I did a master's degree in adult education and I'm trying to create a fairly coordinated teaching program for the residents," he says. "When people talk about education, there is the individual instruction component and the programmatic component - setting out the means by which people can learn a discipline. When you look at education, this aspect is probably more important than the actual teaching."

Pinney finds the foot and ankle subspecialty especially rewarding because it is still in its early stages of development. "Foot and ankle research as a discipline is really exciting because there are still a lot of fundamental questions to be answered," he says. "For instance, there is still a lot of research on hip replacements in terms of what type to do. But foot and ankle surgery is more like hip replacement was in the 1970s, when the questions were about when to do the operation and whether to do it at all."

Paul Abeyta

Paul N. Abeyta, MD is a Sports Medicine Fellow at Stanford University. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. He completed both his medical school and orthopedic training at the University of California, San Francisco. While at UCSF he became the first resident physician to travel to Managua, Nicaragua to work at Hospital Antonio Lenin Fonseca through Orthopaedics Overseas, a division of Health Volunteers Overseas. He served as the initial liaison between the orthopedic residency programs at UCSF and in Managua.  He is a recipient of an Orthopedics Research and Education Fund (OREF) scholarship for his work in Nicaragua. Dr. Abeyta will be entering private practice in San Francisco at the completion of his training and strives to continue building a strong academic relationship with the residency training program at Hospital Lenin Fonseca.

Gerald Dubowitz

Gerald Dubowitz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesia at The University of California, San Francisco, where he works at the UCSF Medical center and Mt Zion Hospitals. He trained in the United Kingdom, graduating from a combined program of St Andrews University in Scotland and Manchester University Medical School in England. After working in internal medicine and then anesthesia, he left the UK in 1997 and arrived in the Bay Area two and a half years later by way of Nepal and New Zealand, The South Pacific and a few places in between. He has had long term interest in working in the developing world, since first working in Kenya in 1988. He since worked in Nepal, The South Pacific, Mexico and several African countries. In addition to clinical anesthesiology, he is currently pursuing his research interests in both High Altitude Physiology and anesthesia/peri-operative care in the developing world. He is especially interested in the establishment of teaching programs for anesthesia in Africa and improvement of the delivery of peri-operative services. He provides an "anesthesia perspective" for IGOT.

Associates

Freddy Abnousi

Freddy Abnousi is currently a first year Orthopedic Surgery resident at UCSF. He has recently completed his MD at the Stanford University School of Medicine, MBA from Oxford University, and MSc in Health Policy, Planning, & Financing from the London School of Economics. At Stanford, he was the Co-founder of the International Health Access Institute, providing opportunities for public-private partnerships to create tailor made solutions for healthcare problems in developing countries. He was the Medical Director of the Roosevelt Institution, Center for Health & Human Services, the first national student thinktank. His past experiences include consulting for the Kenyan Agency for Rural Development, the American Enterprise Institute, British Medical Association, and the Chilean NESsT Venture Philanthropy Fund. His work has been published in numerous scientific journals. His most recent research through the World Bank examines the impact of fraud on primary healthcare for the rural poor in Uttar Pradesh, India. He was most recently recognized as an Action Canada Fellow, awarded to the top 20 most promising young public leaders across Canada, and as a Canadian delegate by the International Academy of Achievement.

Amber Caldwell

Amber Caldwell graduated from UCSB in 2004 with a Bachelor's Degree in Global and International Studies, emphasizing in Cultural Ideology and minored in Sports Medicine.  She was an Athletic Trainer for the collegiate sports teams while an undergraduate and pursued combining her interests in the global health field working for non-profit health organizations.  Upon graduation Amber worked for Surgical Eye Expeditions (SEE) International, a non-profit that organizes Ophthalmologists and supplies for eye surgery clinics overseas. As an International Clinic Coordinator Amber was exposed to the disparities of global health and her interests soon turned towards sustainability.   Amber is currently the Practice Coordinator for the UCSF Foot and Ankle Service within Orthopedic Surgery, working alongside Dr. Stephen J. Pinney.  She is pursing a dual Master's Degree in Business Administration and Public Health at UC Berkeley and hopes to bring sustainability in healthcare to developing countries.

Gabriel J. Martinez-Diaz

Gabriel J. Martinez-Diaz is a third year medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine. He was born and raised in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.  Gabriel attended the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his bachelors with honors in research in Biomedical Engineering. His undergraduate thesis focused on the mechanical and chemical analysis of gelatin based hydrogel degradation. In addition to conducting independent research, Gabriel worked as a clinic coordinator for one of UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health Free Clinic - the South Side Medic Clinic - for nearly three years. Here he developed a strong sense of commitment towards improvement the quality of  health care received by medically underserved communities. In addition to being socially conscious in the field of medicine, Gabriel is passionate about eliminating health and educational disparities, through the improvement of educational opportunities that underrepresented minority communities receive. Upon graduation, and a short teaching experience through the PEOPLE program at UW, Gabriel moved to Bethesda, MD to work at the National Institutes of Health. Here, he participated in the NIH Academy Fellowship - a program whose mission is that of enhancing research dedicated to the elimination of domestic health disparities through the development of a diverse cadre of biomedical researchers. Upon completion of this fellowship, Gabriel matriculated at Stanford University. He is now completing a Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship for Medical Students at the University of California - San Francisco, and in the summer of 2008, he will return to Stanford to complete his last two years of medical school and clinical rotations.

Adam Warren

Adam Warren is a second year resident in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where he is actively studying genes involved in fracture repair.  He is the founder of OrthoJamaica, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving care of injured people in Jamaica, West Indies through donated orthopaedic education and hardware.  Adam is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis on violence and injury prevention.  While studying as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Adam worked in viral vaccines at Chiron Corporation, discoverer of the hepatitis B vaccine. 

Throughout his academic training, Adam has been committed to improving access to health and education in underserved communities. At Stanford University School of Medicine, Adam was selected as a Traveling Scholar and worked with researchers at the University of the West Indies to improve health outcomes for low birth weight babies in Kingston, Jamaica.  He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Music, Mural, and Art Project, an arts-based education project that employs at-risk youth in East Palo Alto, California. Adam earned is BA in Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Immunology from UC Berkeley. He went on to complete his MD degree at Stanford University.

Jaicharan Iyengar

Jaicharan Iyengar is a first-year resident in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He recently spent one month working with Health Volunteers Overseas in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. His current area of interest is finding sustainable ways to improve orthopaedic trauma care in the developing world, particularly focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. As a medical student, Jai was actively involved in health care policy, serving as Vice Chair of the California Medical Association Medical Student Section.

Jai earned his bachelor of arts degree in history with a concentration in South Asia at the University of California, Los Angeles before completing his M.D. at the University of California, San Francisco.

Prior to medical school, Jai worked as a research fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York City