Nicole Giddens, MD

Clinical Instructor

For Nicole Giddens, her career trajectory has always been centered around global health. It started in her undergraduate days when she helped lead the Cornell University chapter of GlobeMed, a national non-profit organization that pairs universities with different international partners, with Cornell's being CEPAIPA - a grassroots, high school-based community health center in La Libertad, Ecuador. After that she joined the United States Peace Corps, in which she served as a health and education volunteer in rural Namibia, helping run a village clinic and organizing health educational demonstrations for the village community members. This trajectory continued throughout her medical education. During medical school at The University of Queensland/Ochsner Clinical School in Australia, she underwent a community health rotation in rural India. Then in IM residency at University of Louisville, she spent an away rotation in Mwanza, Tanzania. While in Tanzania, she also joined current ongoing research funded by the Cornell University Global Health Department, looking at topics such as bedside echocardiography, heart failure, and the relation to HIV. She then continued to grow her passion for global health through a Global Health Fellowship with the Botswana Harvard Partnership and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She now joins UCSF as a new Clinical Instructor, with the intention of continuing global health work through the HEAL Initiative.