Alumni Spotlight

Have Couch, Will Travel
Deanna Glassman, M.D. ’16
Fifteen interviews: it’s not unusual for a medical student to have that many in the process of applying for residency. This can mean having to find up to 15 places to sleep, often in cities or towns thousands of miles from home.
Deanna Glassman, M.D. ’16, remembers the challenges of the interview trail well. That’s why she now volunteers for Help Our Students Travel (HOST) by offering free accommodations to traveling medical school students.
Read More >A Beautiful Tapestry
Loren C. Winterscheid, M.D., Ph.D., Res. ’62 (surgery), FACS
“The aspiration to be a physician had been my desire as long as I can remember.” So wrote the late professor emeritus and alumnus Loren C. Winterscheid, M.D., Ph.D., Res. ’62 (surgery), FACS. Dr. Winterscheid died on Dec. 22, 2017.
Read More >A Call to Serve
Kristel Hallsson
Many eighth-grade girls cover their binders with pictures of pop stars; Kristel Hallsson covered hers with fighter jets. “The military was my passion in life,” she says of her 11-year career in operations intelligence in the U.S. Air Force. “I wanted to be a part of it to protect my country.”
Read More >The Magic Touch
Anita Hendrickson, Ph.D. ’64
Mentor, innovator, ceiling-breaker: that was the late Anita Hendrickson, Ph.D. ’64. When she graduated from high school in 1953, her father wouldn’t pay for college; instead, Hendrickson got a job and financed her own education. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University, earned a doctorate in anatomy from the University of Washington and launched a groundbreaking career in vision science.
Read More >Improving Medical Education, One Trip at a Time
Frank James, M.D. ’83, Res. ’87
“I was pretty certain she wasn’t going to make it,” says James. “But four months later, she was back to digging in her garden. It’s experiences like this that keep me coming back.”
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Finding Kindred Spirits From the Past
Grace Holmes, M.D. ’57
“If I had been the right age, would I have enlisted?”
This was the question that Grace Holmes, M.D. ’57, pondered as she was writing her book: North Dakota Nurses Over There, 1917–1919. The book chronicles the experiences of female nurses who cared for the sick and injured during World War I.
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From the Very First Day
Kindra Freedom, PA-C (Seattle Class 43) and Brad Newhart, PA-C (Anchorage Class 1)
From the Very First Day: Kindra Freedom, PA-C (Seattle Class 43) and Brad Newhart, PA-C (Anchorage Class 1) Kindra and Brad noticed each other on their first day of school at MEDEX Northwest, and it only took a few days for them to build up the courage to meet. MEDEX convenes in Seattle for the first quarter of training, and they started going on study dates. Then Brad went to Alaska for didactics and clinicals. After two years of long-distance phone calls and intermittent vacations, they decided to tie the knot. The best thing about being married to a fellow PA-C, say Kindra and Brad, is that they understand work stressors and serve as each other’s sounding board. They also know when it’s time to leave work at work.
Read More >Seattle’s Own Mama Doc
Wendy Sue Swanson, M.D., Res. ’06
A year into practicing, Jenny McCarthy announced on Oprah that she believed the MMR vaccine gave her son autism. The next day, I was in clinic counseling a family about a one-year check-up. The mom bit her lip when I mentioned MMR on the list of shots and told me she had seen Jenny on Oprah. That’s when I knew I had to start creating online content, and I began to think about where parents were getting health information. I really wanted this mom to understand the phenomenal safety record for MMR and the way it would protect her child.
Read More >From Grad to Fellow
Andy Powers, Ph.D. ’11
As a graduate student, Andy Powers, Ph.D. ’11, studied in the Asbury lab with Chip Asbury, Ph.D. ’99, part of the UW School of Medicine’s Department of Physiology and Biophysics. He now works as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research (NIBR).
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Physician, Novelist, Curator, Activist and TED Fellow
Nassim Assefi, M.D. ’97
As a child of Iranian immigrants, I only had three career choices: doctor, engineer or failure (haha). So I was pre-med as of age eight and I’m lucky that it turned out to be an excellent match with my personality and skills. When I was 19, I found myself doing public health research in Iranian villages, and there was no going back.
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