Dr. Tumaini Rucker Coker (Studio City), assistant professor of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital, was honored with the 2011 Herbert W. Nickens Faculty Fellowship award from the Association of American Medical Colleges in Denver, CO on Nov. 7.
The award recognizes an outstanding junior faculty member who has demonstrated leadership in addressing inequities in medical education and health care; demonstrated efforts in addressing educational, societal, and health care needs of minorities; and is committed to a career in academic medicine. The recipient receives a $15,000 grant to support his or her academic and professional activities.
Coker was selected for the Faculty Fellowship based on her extensive work in child and adolescent health, including her research in the area of preventive care delivery system redesign for children in low-income urban communities. This award will help add technology-based tools to her community-based research project on preventive care practice redesign.
Coker is also a natural scientist at the RAND Corporation and health services researcher at the UCLA/RAND Prevention Research Center. In addition to her work in pediatric preventive care delivery design, Coker has also examined issues of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in family-centered care; the health and health care of homeless children; perceived racial and ethnic discrimination and its effects on child mental health; racial and ethnic disparities in mental health care utilization; and the health and health care of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.
After graduating from Stanford University, Coker earned a concurrent MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a medical degree from the Drew/UCLA Medical Program. She completed her pediatric residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from 2001-2004, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Chicago between 2004 and 2006. She joined UCLA and RAND in 2007.
