Nancy Angoff, MD ’90, MPH ’81, MEd, professor of medicine (general medicine) and associate dean for student affairs, medical education, has retired.
Angoff was a trailblazer in providing compassionate care for patients with HIV/AIDS at the Nathan Smith Clinic during the height of the AIDS crisis. Angoff started at the clinic in 1993 and worked there until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
“Nancy not only treated these patients’ illnesses, she also cared for them as whole people,” says Lydia Aoun-Barakat, MD, associate professor of medicine (infectious diseases); director of Yale Infectious Disease Ambulatory Services and medical director of the Nathan Smith Clinic. Aoun-Barakat met Angoff in 1998 as a first-year infectious disease fellow.
“The patients felt so valued and respected and dignified when they were around her. Twenty-five years ago, we didn't have the tools for HIV, so the patients were very sick. They were facing death. HIV was associated with a lot of stigma, so to just hold their hand through this process and give them hope where there was not much was huge.
“We used to have this meeting and we’d not only talk about patients, we’d talk about systemic barriers of stigma and access to dignifying care for our patients. Nancy’s patients not only loved her, they just adored her.”
Angoff’s route to becoming a doctor was not the traditional one. She first became interested in medicine while in college at Case Western University. There, her roommate was driven to be a doctor, as was her husband-to-be, Ron Angoff, MD, a pediatrician in New Haven.
Angoff received her BA in 1968 and went on to get her master’s in education from the University of Cincinnati in 1971. While her husband attended medical school (also at the University of Cincinnati), Angoff took a job as an English teacher. “I thought that’s my role, I'll get him through medical school. But I was fascinated with what he was learning, I just wanted to hear all about it.”
The Angoffs moved to New Haven in 1973 so Ron could do his residency at Yale. Later that year, their first child was born. Angoff struggled with postpartum depression and quickly realized she was not cut out to be a stay-at-home mother. “I had to get out into the world,” she says.
She started by taking a few night classes in public health at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. As it turned out, the teacher taught at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) during the day. She ended up writing Angoff a letter of recommendation that helped gain her admission to the school.
A few years after getting her MPH (in 1981), Angoff enrolled in pre-med courses through the Special Students Program at Yale (now called the Eli Whitney Students Program). In 1990, she graduated with an MD from Yale School of Medicine (YSM).
“I knew I wanted to take care of people with HIV. When I started medical school, is when [the AIDS crisis] was all coming to be, it was happening in front of my eyes. These were people that no one wanted to take care of. Doctors were saying, ‘I'm not going to care for those people.’ I thought, ‘What? That's ridiculous. I'm going to care for those people.’”
After completing her residency at YNHH in internal medicine in 1993, Angoff met with Gerald Friedland, MD, professor emeritus of medicine, YSM, and epidemiology and public health, YPSH, and told him she wanted to take care of people with HIV.
“And so, she was incorporated into our clinic staff,” says Friedland. Over the course of the next decade or two, Nancy and I were colleagues and cared for a very challenging group of people living with HIV, who we all had great affection for.”
At the time, the infectious disease curriculum included a full-day program related to HIV and AIDS, including biology of the virus, treatment, prevention, and epidemiology. Angoff decided to invite her patients, people living with the virus, to present to the students.
“There would be maybe three in the course of an hour, and they would tell their stories as people living with HIV,” says Friedland. “The students had an opportunity to ask questions and Nancy moderated in her exquisitely sensitive and supportive and precise way.
“You could hear a pin drop in the audience. It was so compelling. One of the most memorable things for the students in that entire course was the patients telling their own stories, about the issues of stigma, about health care availability, non-availability, about their sufferings, about telling their families about their issues of death and dying, about their relationship with their doctors, and so many other things.
“Generations of students really will have been so fortunate for having her. I was at a number of medical schools before coming to Yale, and there's no one like Nancy, who took care of students, who led them, who was deeply involved in their lives as well as their careers, who was an exemplar as a physician as well, and someone to be modeled after.”
Ruth Katz, JD, MPH, thinks Angoff’s non-traditional route to medicine served her well. Katz served as associate dean for administration at YSM from 1997 to 2003 and is currently the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Health, Medicine & Society Program.
“I think a big part of what made Nancy so effective, so creative, and so open-minded about how to approach the dean’s job was her non-traditional journey to medicine. She got there her own way and in her own time – and she got there for all the right reasons. So, she understood the importance of helping to guide students on their own individual professional paths – no cookie cutter approach for Nancy. She was always open to different points of view. But she was also fully prepared to make final decisions and follow through with them – and always with a wonderful sense of humor, an incredibly important attribute for any successful administrator.”
Katz distinctly recalls when Angoff interviewed for the position of Associate Dean of Student Affairs in 1998.
“It was clear Nancy was eminently qualified for the job and very much wanted the job,” Katz says. “The search committee had interviewed a few candidates who were very good. At one point during the review process, David Kessler, dean of the medical school at the time, asked me how well certain candidates had done during their interviews. I told him each had interviewed quite well, ‘but wait until you meet with Nancy Angoff.’ It was slam dunk choice. I believe I can speak on behalf of Dean Kessler in saying that Nancy’s appointment as dean of students was among the best decisions we made.”
In her role as associate dean for student affairs, Angoff was responsible for many curricular and extracurricular innovations such as the course Introduction to the Profession (iPro), Power Day, and the Peer Advocates Program.
“As Dean of Students, Professor Angoff provided inspired leadership at Yale School of Medicine and as a result, over 2000 graduates have benefited from her wisdom and guidance as they launched their own careers as physician leaders in American medicine.”, says Patrick G. O’Connor, MD, MPH, MACP, Dan Adams and Amanda Adams Professor of Medicine and Chief, General Internal Medicine. “She also leveraged her roles at Yale to lead nationally as a scholar in medical education, effectively translating her leadership and creative approach to medical education at Yale into thoughtful and groundbreaking publications that have brought her educational innovations to national and international audiences.”
In retirement, Angoff will be on the other side of the exam table, as a standardized patient. She is currently one at Quinnipiac University and hopes to eventually become one at Yale.
“To me it's giving back, it's teaching,” Angoff says. “I love teaching, and I love acting. I want to help students learn the skills they need to become caring physicians. So that's what I'm really looking forward to. And if I allow myself to fantasize, like really fantasize, I want a very small part on Broadway that doesn't require learning a lot of lines.”
Angoff earned emeritus status in January 2023.