Class of 2003; 10th Reunion

It was such a joy to see a record-breaking crew at our 10th reunion. Updates from some who could make it and some who couldn’t are below. Needless to say, some things have changed but much hasn’t. Most of all, the reunion reminded us of how many beautiful spirits we encountered at our time at YSM, how much fun we had when all was said and done (or not), and how lucky we are to be a part of this incredible family. We missed those who couldn’t make it and really hope to see them at next go around. For now, enjoy these updates.

Leah Ahoya: Glad to be at reunion this year. Practicing ob/gyn in Pennsylvania. Came with my hubby Opoku and son Barima, who is 4 years old. Come visit if you’re ever in the state.

Raj Ayyagari: I’m very happy my hair loss has slowed down considerably. Also my prostate condition has cleared up! (A hearty thanks to Raj and wife Uma (also in the YSM fam) for hosting a fabulous after-party.)

Mark Berman: After primary care IM training in Boston, I worked for RWJF on their obesity prevention initiatives. Then I moved to San Francisco to join a health information technology startup. Now I mix clinical time (obesity and lifestyle medicine) with health systems design. My life remains a grand adventure with a beautifully vague direction.

Shannelle Campbell: I’m back home in South Carolina in private practice general surgery. Mom to an amazing 5-year-old, little Roderick. Happily living compassionately as a vegan—Mark Berman was on to something! Elin and Sean Christensen are still in New Haven County! They live in Guilford with their daughter Gretel, who is 18 months old and very enamored with bunnies. Elin practices primary care in Madison, Conn., and Sean is finishing his fellowship in Mohs surgery in July and will join the Yale Derm Faculty. Great to see everyone!

Ada (Nwaneri) Emuwa moved from Tennessee to New Jersey as husband Chi was accepted into fellowship at UMDNJ. Now with two kids, Adora and Kachi. Working as a family physician and head of HIV programs for Newark Community Health Centers.

Bahar Firoz is married to Scott Henning (also in derm) and after spending four years in Texas, recently moved back home to New Jersey to practice. They have an 18-month-old son, Lain. Bahar is so happy to see how wonderful everyone is doing at this 10-year reunion (Has it really been 10 years?)

Rina Garcia: I just celebrated my 10th wedding anniversary with my husband William. We have a 6-year-old son named Noah who is an amazing blessing. Professionally, I am on my sixth year at Yale working as a clinician educator in internal medicine primary care.

After leaving New Haven, Katherine Gergen-Barnett and her husband Mark moved with their son Gabriel to Boston where she completed a family medicine residency at Boston Medical Center, New England’s largest safety net hospital. She was hired as an attending there and for the last five years has been practicing family medicine (her patients come from all over the world and are among her greatest teachers), attending on the wards, teaching residents and medical students. Additionally, she now directs the Integrative Medicine Clinical Services for the hospital where, free of charge, our patients can partake in yoga, massage, acupuncture, meditation, cooking classes, tai chi, and integrative medicine consults. The work is fulfilling and home life is wonderfully busy: She and Mark have three children: Gabriel, 9, Amira Skye, 5, and Hannah Bina, 5 months. Please come visit if you are in Boston!

Matthew Goldenberg is completing a degree in global mental health at the London School of Hygiene and Topical Medicine. He has served as the medical student clerkship director in psychiatry at Dartmouth and Uniformed Services University. His first children’s book, A is for Artisanal: An Alphabet Book for the Hip, Modern Baby , will be published this summer. He’s teamed up with his brother to a write a column for espn.com and train for a marathon.

Michael Greenspan, with Severine Chavel (M.D. ’04): Michael has joined a commune in New Mexico dedicated to finding true peace through people. He has 15 wonderful children, and would love to see any of you passing through the southwest. More truthfully, he says at our reunion dinner: “I am very very, very, very happy to be here.”

Pamina Kim: After finishing medicine residency, getting married, and practicing as a hospitalist for a few years, I decided that I wanted to do something a little different. So I went back to training (yes, really!) to do a dermatology residency, during which I had my two children Luke, 3½, and Olive, 17 months. I’ve promised my family that I will not go back for any further training! And I’m now loving working part-time in private practice and being a mom.

Pramita Kuruvilla: Back in the Bay area on faculty at a public teaching hospital, working as an ICU/palliative care/ethics consultant, had a brief séjour with MSF in Côte d’Ivoire post-civil war. Still love run-on sentences, wandering through the world, and keeping in touch with folks.

Maya Lodish, with husband Jay, and Talia, 1-and-a-half, and Isabelle, 5: So great to catch up with you guys. We live in Cabin John, Md. I am a pediatric endocrinologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development doing clinical research and I am deputy director of our peds endo fellowship. Come visit anytime.

Roberto Lugo: Kelli and I have two boys, Sebastian and Xander, and are living in Stuart, Fla. I work as an orthopaedic surgeon in a community setting. Anyone interested in a visit is welcome to ring us up!

Kyeen Mesesan Andersson lived for several years in South Africa, where she met her husband Richard and conducted dissertation research for her Ph.D. in public health. She was involved in a motor vehicle accident shortly after graduating in 2007, and remained in New Haven where she has been rehabilitating her spinal injuries. Ky is currently a senior modeler and policy analyst at the Futures Institute and Rich does tech transfer at the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale. They have two girls, Amelia Outeniqua, 3, and Alexis Tsitsikamma, 1½, named after sister mountain ranges in South Africa, so they will either appreciate their unique names or curse their parents when they grow up!

Rahel Nardos: Currently living in Portland, Ore., with my husband Damien and my two children Ermias, 8, and Abyssinia, 11 months. Ermias is loving his Spanish immersion program (even though no one else in the family understands him) and Abyssinia is crawling and babbling galore. I work as a urogynecologist at Kaiser Permanente and as a research/global health faculty at Oregon Health and Science University. Love the Northwest. Come visit anytime!

Alejandro Necochea: After internal medicine in Philly, public health/preventive medicine and hospitalist work in Baltimore, kid #1: Eva Lucia (now 3), came a BIG MOVE to Boise, Idaho, where my wife (Lauren) is from. Then came kid #2: Cecilia (now 14 months). Now working as hospitalist site director and medical director of care management (kind of like population health) at St. Luke’s Health System.

Jennifer Palmer (nee Teitelbaum): I am living in Baltimore with my husband, Galen Palmer, a computer programmer whom I married in 2006. We have been doing Bikram yoga for over two years. I am a part-time Johns Hopkins psychiatry faculty member and see consults for the Johns Hopkins Women’s Mood Disorders Center once weekly. I spend the rest of the week in private practice. In addition, I am very involved in the Maryland Psychiatric Society (district branch of the American Psychiatric Association) including serving as a council member and the chair of the legislative committee. I hope you are all well!

In July David Peaper will become an assistant professor of laboratory medicine at the School of Medicine, where he will be director of clinical microbiology at Yale-New Haven Hospital and director of the Virology Reference Laboratory at the West Haven CT VA. He and his wife Katherine Perry (YSN ’02) live in the New Haven area with their children Elliot, 4, and Nora, 1.

Sunny Ramchandani: Really miss our days at Yale. I’m now in San Diego, working on population health and helping our patients lead healthy lives. Look forward to seeing folks when they come to Southern California!

Mari Rebane-Mazzotta is a mother of two, double boarded in general and plastic surgery, and is in private practice in Middletown, Conn.

Alejandro Reti: In January, I moved to Charlotte, N.C., with my wife Karen and two kids. Cleo, 3, helps me water the plants in the new garden and Adrian, 1, likes to toddle dangerously close to our new engine-less lawnmower. Work designing population health management software and services for my new company has been a welcome challenge. But not as challenging as raising two kids!

Marta Rivera is in private practice in internal medicine in Virginia. Single, no children. Involved in TV work, Eastern Virginia Medical School clinical monitoring for medical students, local church women’s ministry. Travels (most recently to Patagonia), learning kitesurfing, volunteers at free clinic. Thrilled to be here with you all—so many fond memories!

David Ross is now on the Yale faculty in the psychiatry department in the clinician-educator track. He spends half his time doing outpatient work in the PTSD clinic at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System and the other half as one of the associate program directors for the Adult Psychiatry Residency Program. On the home front, he and his wife Shana are still cleaning up the mess from their son’s second birthday party (turtles and dump trucks galore).

Susan Rushing: Karl Richter and I now have four children together. Elizabeth is 6 and a half, Kaitlyn is 5, and our twin boys Kieran and Jonathan are 10 months. I combine my medical and legal training as an assistant professor of psychiatry at UPenn, where I teach in the medical school and in the college. Last semester I offered a course called Neurolaw through the Department of Criminology.

Rebecca Seekamp: Got married to the most amazing man in 2011. Got promoted to (clinical) asst prof at Stanford 2011. Had my daughter in 2012. Moved to Palo Alto (Stanford) in 2013. Seeing lots of ’03 friends! Saeher, Danny Pham, Stephen Shiao, to name a few. Still adjusting to move and husband has a work conference in Vancouver of all places, so not a good time for us to come out, but there in spirit!

Namita Seth Mohta: Since residency, I have been living in Boston. Vinay and I have two children, Aanika, 5, and Ayaan, 3. I work at Partners Health Care as medical director of our Population Health Care Management Department and see patients as a hospitalist at the Brigham. We continue to travel, eat, and visit with friends and family whenever we can!

Joahd Toure and his wife Viviana are living in Boston. Earlier this spring they had their first child, Omar. Joahd is working as the regional medical director for EIP, a hospitalist management company.

Nimi Tuamokumo: I finished residency and moved to Houston, Texas, where I love it. Everything is definitely bigger in Texas. I married a native Texan and in January of 2013 we had our little girl Macy. I am working in private practice radiation oncology and am really happy. But I have to ask ... how is it really 10 years?!

Boris Veysman: Miss you all, even if we didn’t spend much time together way back then. Wish to do the first two years all over again. Might even go to lecture this time, though I am not entirely sure I actually would. I work nights, by choice, at the ER near Rutgers in Jersey, and am home for dinner every night with our twins Aaron and Alana, now 7. I still write, which is a terrible addiction I try to keep under control. Recent stuff in my column at ACEPnews: http://www.acepnews.com/views/get-better.html. So sending love and good wishes from Jersey. Find me on Facebook if you wish. Always happy to get together for a coffee anytime you are around these parts. I may say something ridiculous, but promise to not disappoint. What would happen if you reverse the flow through the liver?

—Mark Berman