Recent Honors & Awards

Faculty

Lea Grinberg, MD, PhD received the 2023 Pioneer Award given by the Precision Medicine World Conference. The award recognizes her foresight and groundbreaking contributions that paved the way toward advancements in the standard of care.

Elena Tsoy, PhD has been named as one of the 2023 Class of Deans’ Population Health and Health Equity Scholars.

At the Annual Meeting of the American Neurological Association, Sasha Gupta, MD and Paul Sampognaro, MD received the ANA2022 Poster Award, and Jonathan Kleen, MD, PhD won the ANA2022 Emerging Scholar Award.

The inaugural Cheryl Jay Master Clinician Awards in Neurology were presented to Ian Bledsoe, MD, MS (Junior Faculty category), Vineeta Singh, MD (Senior Faculty category) and Tina Shih, MD (Senior Faculty category). The award is named for Dr. Cheryl Jay, a neurologist at UCSF who had a deep commitment to her patients and social justice in medicine.

Mercedes Paredes, MD, PhD has won the Science Diversity Leadership Award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in recognition of her program to train scholars from historically underrepresented backgrounds to conduct basic and translational research.

Nicole Rosendale, MD won the UCSF Chancellor Award for LGBTQI Leadership in the Faculty category for her extraordinary leadership.

Katerina Akassoglou, PhD received the 2022 ISFP Prize for “outstanding contributions to the field of fibrinolysis and proteolysis” at the 3rd Joint Meeting of the International Society for Fibrinolysis & Proteolysis and the Plasminogen Activation Workshop at Caen, France. Dr. Akassoglou is the first woman to receive the award since its inauguration in 1974.

Ernesto Gonzalez-Giraldo, MD has received The Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educator’s 2022 Excellence in Teaching Award.

Staff

Fonda Smith, Operations Manager for the Memory and Aging Center, won the 2022 Holly Smith Award for exceptional service to the School of Medicine — the school’s most prestigious award. Watch her video here. 

Trainees

Eleanor Palser, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at the Memory and Aging Center, won the Chancellor Award for the Advancement of Women, following her paper in Nature that highlighted the underrepresentation of women in the editorial boards of neuroscience and psychology journals.

Rachel Vassar, MD, child neurology resident, won the 2022 Young Investigators Award from the San Francisco Neurological Society for her project, “Timing of Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapies in Children after Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest: A Retrospective, Observational Study.”