Jasmine Marcelin, MD, Associate Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases; Vice Chair for Equity & Inclusive Excellence, Department of Internal Medicine
Dr. Marcelin is an Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Medicine. All of her clinical time is on teaching services with learners and she also lectures in the COM, summer health professions program, and other areas on an annual basis. From 2018-2019 she was co-Director of the HIV Enhanced Medical Education Track program in the College of Medicine, involving direct education and mentorship of students with an interest in HIV medicine. From 2019-2024 she was an Associate Program Director in the Internal Medicine Residency Program, and in that role developed a thriving resident curriculum on Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion. She is currently the Vice Chair of Equity & Inclusive Excellence in the Department of Internal Medicine and involved with education and developing initiatives related to building a culture of inclusive excellence in their department.
My mother is an educator, focusing on children with learning disabilities. I always valued the effort of educators but in my youth when I debated between becoming a science teacher and a children's doctor, I believed I did not have the patience required to be a teacher. Little did I know that teaching lies at the very core of what it means to be a physician. Looking back at my journey, when I considered jobs after fellowship I realized that I was always destined to become an educator, and the ability to develop this skill was a nonnegotiable for me. Early in my faculty career I developed a personal mission statement, “To create and support a healthcare and graduate medical education environment that strives for excellence, and values Inclusion, Diversity, Access, and Equity as not only important, but necessary, for excellence (success)”, which still today fully encapsulates my approach to medical education.
Teaching has been an essential source of joy in my career portfolio from my earliest training days in medical school as a TA, through my graduate medical training where I developed an ID teaching curriculum for the FM residency program, and my current position as an Associate Professor of Medicine in the UNMC Division of Infectious Diseases, where I have enjoyed working with learners and community partners to develop curricula for our trainees. I knew that my first position after fellowship needed to have a significant teaching component, and that was why I chose UNMC for this job. During my time at UNMC, I have incorporated teaching into my job at all learner levels (student, resident, fellows) on the inpatient general infectious diseases teaching rotation, outpatient HIV clinic, various didactics including facilitating small groups and developing lectures, and mentoring. I have developed curricula for medical student and resident education, and also extend that medical education to my colleagues and community through multiple speaking engagements each year.
Getting the foundational understanding of adaptive teaching styles was important so I took advantage of any teaching seminars offered while I was in training. In 2022 I was fortunate to be named as a Gold Humanism Scholar for the Harvard Macy Institute Program for Medical Educators. The award recognizes healthcare educators whose work helps develop or evaluate educational projects focused on achieving humanistic patient care that can be replicated across a variety of healthcare delivery settings. Understanding the pedagogy of medical education was useful as I considered how I would transform the JEDI with Jasmine program from an informal lunch-n-learn to a formal curriculum with assessments. One of the lessons from the HMI Program for Educators was turning education into scholarship, underscoring the importance of carefully planned assessment and dissemination in moving one from a lecturer to an educator.
The thing that makes me the most proud (other than seeing my mentees succeed with this work) is that we intentionally involved our community partners in our education work and in addition to ensuring that we can compensate them for their time, prioritized including them in the scholarship as manuscript authors. Their input has always been invaluable and it is important to honor their valued contributions in this way.
I'll share three impactful ones; the common thread of these is a desire to develop curricula that are addressing a gap/need, build in sustainability and innovation, begin with the assessment in mind, and intentionally involve input and collaboration from community partners. Together with a former medical student mentee (Dr. Rohan Khazanchi), I have developed a pilot to incorporate a Structural Challenges and Inequities in Healthcare Delivery curriculum into the undergraduate medical curriculum, now published in Clinical Teacher. I also collaborated with another former student mentee (Dr. Mckenzie Rowe) to develop an interprofessional symposium for health professions students dealing with racial bias - our team was awarded a grant to develop professionally produced videos depicting different healthcare bias scenarios. We have presented this work at several conferences, have submitted a manuscript which is under review, and our team received an interprofessional education innovation award for this work. Another example is the JEDI with Jasmine curriculum, a new residency experience I developed to create a safe space for residents to discuss issues related to cultural competency, navigating structural discrimination and effective allyship for their colleagues and patients. Initial assessment and experiences with this curriculum has been presented at several regional, national, and international stages this year by our team of colleagues, trainees and mentees, and we are developing the manuscript for publication.
My proudest moments as an educator are always when my mentees succeed, not only at their goals or tasks, but at developing and pursuing their own missions. I constantly look for opportunities to support them through nominations, projects, clinical teaching, scholarships, and advancement. My legacy will be the successes of each person I mentor, and the successes of each person they subsequently mentor, and so on. Every day I am grateful and feel tremendously honored that they would allow me to walk on this journey with them.