First Appeared Tuesday, 17 December '02

Honors for Extraordinary Diversity Efforts

A professor who has mentored scores of current and future dentists, a staff member who has volunteered to teach Spanish to UCSF students, and a student who overcame poverty to get to this campus and become a role model for others have been named winners of the 2003 Martin Luther King Jr. Award.

The winners of the annual UCSF awards for extraordinary efforts to promote diversity are: Newton C. Gordon, DDS, clinical professor in the School of Dentistry and chief of dentistry and the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Service at San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center; Jorge Garcia-Sarzosa, an administrative analyst in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy; and Leticia Melgoza-Webb, a fourth-year student in the School of Pharmacy.

They will be honored on Thursday, January 23, noon to 2 p.m., at a ceremony in Cole Hall. The ceremony is part of Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Week at UCSF.

Newton Gordon, honored in the faculty category for the award, was praised by colleagues and students for supporting and encouraging poor and minority students to enter health care professions. “Dr. Gordon’s mentoring role has fulfilled many dreams of the often underrepresented minority students,” wrote his nominators, including faculty colleagues, students and staff. “Their dreams were not only to become quality dentists, physicians or researchers, but to become productive citizens in our community.”

Gordon, who joined the UCSF faculty in 1973, is an accomplished scientist who studies pain mechanism and management and a clinician who “has supported broad access to care for all the populations served by SFGHMC.”

He is credited with helping change the Board of Dental Examiners test to eliminate race and sex bias, and at the UCSF School of Dentistry, he created the Council of Minority Faculty.

Jorge Garcia-Sarzosa, winner in the award’s staff category, last year started the School of Pharmacy’s elective course “Spanish for Pharmacists.” He teaches the course as a volunteer every Wednesday evening during the school year, and medical, nursing and dental students often join the class.

Garcia-Sarzosa’s background is in physiology, and he holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from Mexico. “Not only did he give the students basic and useful Spanish language skills, but he shared his own personal experiences that enriched the whole learning experience, linking pharmacy to another language and culture that allowed me to see the health profession on a different level,” wrote one student. “In fact, I was able to directly use the knowledge I gained from his class during my summer internship at a pharmacy in San Diego near the Mexican-American border.”

Leticia Melgoza-Webb, the student award winner, grew up in the Central Valley where her mother worked as a field laborer to support her family. She was the first in her family to go to college, and in June, she will graduate from the School of Pharmacy.

During her years at UCSF, she has been active in minority outreach and recruitment. As a member of Chicanos for Health Education her first year here, she helped bring to the campus 80 Chicano high school students from around the state and conducted workshops on pharmacy as a career. As president of the UCSF chapter of the Student National Pharmaceutical Assocation, she secured funds from the School of Pharmacy to travel to Southern California to recruit potential students.

She has organized hands-on activities for underrepresented students in the Health Science Enrichment Program, participated in numerous health fairs and events in San Francisco neighborhoods, and served as a member of the Chancellor’s Committee on Diversity.

Links:

Previous MLK Award Winners