Dr. Tumaini Rucker Coker, assistant professor of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital was honored with the 2012 Nemours Child Health Services Research Award at the Academy Health annual research meeting in Orlando on June 23.
The Nemours Child Health Services Research Award recognizes the scientific work of one emerging scholar each year in the field of child health services research, particularly research on quality improvement of pediatric health services. AcademyHealth is the professional home for health services researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners, and a leading, non-partisan resource for the best in health research and policy.
Coker was selected based on her substantial contributions in child health services research that focus on delivery system redesign for child and adolescent preventive health services, as well as racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health and health care. She investigates innovative models of health care delivery within the context of the patient-centered medical home to improve the quality of primary care services delivered to children in low-income communities. She is currently directing two separate federally funded studies to design and pilot-test new models of preventive care delivery for low-income families with young children.
Her work has been published in various journals including JAMA, Pediatrics, and the American Journal of Public Health and has been covered by mainstream news media outlets. She is a recipient of several awards, including the 2011 Association of American Medical Colleges Herbert W. Nickens Faculty Fellowship.
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 supervises residents and medical students in general pediatrics at UCLA and is a natural scientist at RAND.
