Who gets heard. Who is protected. What changes.

Violence prevention & survivor advocacy

Ending sexual and domestic violence

The longest-running thread in my work: supporting people after violence, and prevention education.

I am Jane Doe. Breaking silence, and making room for others to be heard

Supporting someone after violence has happened, in an emergency department or on a crisis line, is different from examining the social norms, power structures, and behaviors that make violence more likely. Both matter, and neither replaces the other.

Primary prevention

Primary prevention means stopping violence before it starts: changing the norms that excuse it, teaching what healthy relationships look like, and engaging men and young people in the work. That was the aim of my peer education with PAVE, of Men Making a Difference and the NOMAS conference in Madison, of the prevention talks I gave on New York City campuses through SAVI, and of Relaciones Saludables, youth violence prevention with Mar de Jade in Las Varas, Mexico.

From the archive · 2003

“PAVEing the Way,” On Wisconsin, Spring 2003, on PAVE’s peer education at UW–Madison and Silent Crimes, Outspoken Voices. Read the article (PDF)

How this work began is a longer story, and it lives on my About page. The roots of my advocacy →

Surgeons around the world, moving from response to prevention: now on the Intimate Partner Violence page →

Responding to harm without repeating it is also the core of trauma-informed care, in surgery and beyond.

Resources for clinicians: IPV screening, response and referral, supporting colleagues, and violence at work. IPV screening, response and referral are in What I’m working on; supporting colleagues and violence at work are on Mental Health in Medicine.

Health equity

Health equity and access

Reproductive access, the World Trade Center monitoring program, and the Ride for World Health.

This work spans reproductive access and helping build the systems that make care and evidence possible.

World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program, 2004–2006

At Mount Sinai’s World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program, in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, I worked as part of a much larger effort to ensure that rescue and recovery workers exposed during and after September 11 received the medical attention, long-term monitoring, and research their exposures warranted.

My part was behind the scenes: assisting with quality assurance, questionnaire development, and domestic violence research consultation, helping put in place the patient-monitoring and referral systems that supported coordinated medical screenings, and helping train clinical staff to use them. It meant recognizing an ongoing responsibility to people whose health had been placed at risk, and helping build what was needed to understand and respond to those risks over time.

Documentary photographs · 2002–2013 Inside the Clinic: Health Effects of 9/11 Photographs by Earl Dotter · CDC World Trade Center Health Program online exhibition Dotter’s photographs of the Mount Sinai monitoring program show responders’ evaluations over the years: intake interviews, lung-function testing, and mental health screening. Care and follow-up, not the disaster itself. View the photographs →

Also covered in Pulse, New Jersey Medical School, Summer 2006 (PDF).

Access, equity, and human rights

• 2003Community health and human rights exchanges in Honduras and Nicaragua: clinics serving environmentally affected communities, environmental justice organizing, a center caring for survivors of torture and their families, and youth health education through media. Physicians for Human Rights leadership training the same year.
• 2005One of 15 women selected for the Women’s Empowerment Institute, a Capitol Hill advocacy and leadership program sponsored by the American Medical Student Association.
• 2005–2009With the Haven Coalition in New York City (2005–2006) and ACCESS/Women’s Health Rights Coalition in Oakland (2007–2009), helped people traveling for reproductive healthcare with transportation, housing, meals, and support.
• 2007Hosted AMSA’s national Primary Care Leadership Training Program on health disparities, leadership, curricular reform, and health policy, for 20 medical and 20 dental students selected nationally.
• 2008–2012Liaison to the Student National Medical Association, the Latino Medical Student Association, and the Native American Health Association.
• 2008–2009Took part in UCSF’s 2008 commemoration of Juana Alicia’s SANARTE murals (more on Artistry and Medicine), and in October 2009 brought Harriet Washington back to UCSF AMSA, after first meeting her at the 2007 AMSA Western Regional conference at UCSF. I hosted and moderated her talk, “American Apartheid: Notes on Race, Ethics and US Medical Education,” followed by a student leadership panel with AMSA, SNMA, LMSA, NAHA, and APAMSA.
• 2011–2012Founded the Student Health Equity Alliance at UCSF, connecting clinicians, trainees, and scientists to address health disparities.
• 2011Raised the funds to bring Dr. Augustus A. White III, author of Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care, to UCSF on November 9, 2011, for Orthopaedic Grand Rounds (“Compassionate Patient Care and Personal Survival in Orthopaedics”), a community conversation on how patients and clinicians can work together to achieve health equity, and a campus lecture and book signing.

Institutions, policy & collective action

Working within institutions, and acting together

Committees, governance, and public comment, and the 2024 Buffalo resident physicians’ collective action. My kids joined me on the picket line, September 2024.

Committees, governance, and public comment offer a seat where decisions are discussed. They can shape a policy’s wording, bring forward evidence, and keep an issue on the agenda. They rarely decide the outcome. Collective action works differently: it changes what an institution has to negotiate. I’ve worked both ways, and they are not the same thing.

• 2004, 2007Served on reference committees of the American Medical Student Association House of Delegates, weighing testimony and making recommendations on membership and medical education policy.
• 2007–2009Served on UCSF’s Chancellor’s Advisory Committees on the Status of Women (2007–2009) and on Diversity (2008–2009).
• 2012Received the UCSF Chancellor’s Award for the Advancement of Women, in the student category.
• 2016–2019With the Resident and Associate Society of the ACS: wrote professional social media guidance for surgeons with its Advocacy and Action Committee, published as a society statement J Am Coll Surg 2017 in 2017, and later served as its Social Media Chair.

Building community online

In 2011, as a medical student, I founded the Association of Women Surgeons’ Twitter presence and helped recruit and mentor its contributors. Later I helped grow the Resident and Associate Society of the ACS’s Twitter team from one person to thirty-five, and co-founded #obsm, a monthly chat that brought patients, surgeons, and other professionals into the same conversation about obesity.