Lekshmi Santhosh appointed the inaugural Associate Chair for People Development and Mentorship

Lekshmi Santhosh, MD, MA, associate professor of medicine in the UCSF Health Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep, and Allergy, has been appointed as the inaugural Associate Chair for People Development and Mentorship in the Department of Medicine. The appointment will commence on September 1, 2024.

Lekshmi graduated from Yale, where she majored in psychology and behavioral neuroscience. After completing medical school at Harvard, she came to UCSF in 2011 for residency training. Three years later, she was a unanimous selection for chief medical resident. She completed her fellowship at UCSF in pulmonary and critical care, earned her master’s degree in medical education from UC Berkeley, and joined our faculty in 2018, rapidly rising to associate professor.

Since joining the faculty, Lekshmi has had an enormous impact on medical education throughout the department and school. She is an associate program director (APD) of the internal medicine residency program and our pulmonary/critical care fellowship. She has also served as director of medical grand rounds at UCSF Health for the last two years. In this role, she has brought an innovative approach to these sessions, which have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people at UCSF and beyond.

Lekshmi has won several prestigious teaching awards. She currently holds the Gold-Headed Cane Endowed Educational Chair in Internal Medicine. She is also an elected member of the Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators. She has received the Floyd Rector Resident Research Mentoring Award, the UCSF Exceptional Physician Award, and the Alison Clay Early Career Educator Award from the American Thoracic Society; she is also chair-elect of the ATS Section on Medical Education. Additionally, she was in the inaugural class of the prestigious National Academy of Medicine Diagnostic Excellence Scholars.

Clinically, Lekshmi attends in the Medical ICU, the Neuro-ICU, the outpatient Pulmonary Clinic, and on the Hospital Medicine teaching service. When Covid-19 struck, she immediately recognized the need for an outpatient clinic to treat patients with Long Covid. To serve this population, she founded and directed the UCSF Health OPTIMAL Clinic, focused on patients with persistent symptoms after a severe initial case of Covid.

On top of her many contributions to clinical care and education, she has also amassed an impressive scholarly record, with more than 90 publications in her areas of interest, including ICU transitions of care, women in leadership, clinical reasoning, and subspecialty career choice.

Our most important resource is our people. While we have several mentoring and leadership programs in the DOM focused on different faculty groups (e.g., clinician-educators, basic scientists, etc.) and trainees, we haven’t had a single leader charged with bringing these programs together, filling any gaps, and promoting innovation in the areas of mentorship and people development. This new position will allow Lekshmi to apply her tremendous educational, mentorship, and leadership skills to our work in this area, to the benefit of all our faculty and trainees. In her role, she will work closely with our Associate Chairs for Faculty Experience (Urmimala Sarkar) and Education (Brian Schwartz) and other leaders throughout the department, School of Medicine, and campus.