Gentry Patrick, PhD

Dr. Gentry N. Patrick is the Kavli and Dr. William and Marisa Rastetter Chancellor’s Endowed Chair and Professor in Neurobiology.  Dr. Patrick is a leader in the field of ubiquitin-dependent protein turnover in neurons in health and neurodegenerative disease with a particular interest in the trafficking and turnover of synaptic proteins including AMPA-type glutamate receptors. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Dr. Patrick’s lived experience is a testament to the power of access, mentorship, and advocacy.  His personal and professional journey into Neuroscience and academia has presented him with opportunities to leverage his own experience as an underrepresented minority student in STEM to innovate and advocate for systemic change in STEM education. In 2018, Dr. Patrick developed and launched the PATHways to STEM through Enhanced Access and Mentorship (PATHS) Program, a competitive STEM excellence scholarship program for undergraduate students from marginalized communities. Committed to diversifying the STEM and healthcare profession pipeline by building networks of support and access for under-resourced communities, Dr. Patrick has made a significant impact across the San Diego community.  He is also the inaugural Director of the Center for Empathy and Social Justice in Human Health (CESJHH) within the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion at UC San Diego where he intends to leverage the power of partnership and storytelling to diversify STEM and healthcare professional spaces, effectively mitigate health disparities among marginalized communities, and explore how the intersection of empathy, compassion, and social justice can measure and catalyze systemic change for improved inclusivity and justice in human health.  Dr. Patrick received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999 after working in the laboratory of Dr. Li-Huei Tsai. He was a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and a United Negro College Fund/Merck postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Erin Schuman at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Patrick joined the faculty in 2004. To learn more about Dr. Patrick's work, click here. 

Leigh Eck

Center Strategist

Leigh has held leadership positions in non-profits dedicated to the arts, environmental stewardship and food justice, and education. She has worked as a strategist, producer, programmer, relationship manager, fundraiser, and artist, and is dedicated to creating a more sustainable and just society. Having worked alongside Dr. Patrick in the development and launch of the PATHways to STEM (PATHS) Program at UC San Diego, Leigh now facilitates the visioning and strategic planning process for the CESJHH as Center Strategist. She is trained compassion teacher by way of the Applied Compassion Training Program at The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. She holds a BFA in Music Theatre Performance from the Hartt School, University of Hartford and resides with her husband and two young children in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Sará King, M.A., PhD

Post-Doctoral Fellow in Public Health

Dr. Sará King is an internationally recognized neuroscientist, artist, political and learning scientist, education philosopher, social impact entrepreneur, and public speaker. She has completed her YTT-200 and YTT-300 hr. yoga teacher trainings as well as her certification as a mindfulness meditation teacher with Spirit Rock in Marin, CA. She is passionate about catalyzing humanity’s capacity to heal ourselves from the inside out and dedicated to creating accessible contemplative practices at the nexus of art, music, and meditation. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Public Health at the T. Denny Sanford Institute's Center for Empathy and Social Justice in Human Health at UC San Diego. She is also the founder of MindHeart AI, an Ai start-up specializing in building platforms, software, and tools grounded in neuroscience, healing and well-being.  She is also the author of “The Science of Social Justice” framework for research and facilitation and the inventor of the “Systems Based Awareness Map” (SBAM) - the world’s first theoretical map of human awareness - which she developed to explore our capacity to heal intergenerational trauma and promote the well-being of "collective nervous systems”. In 2021, she was named “One-To-Watch” by Mindful Magazine, as well as she made the November cover of Yoga Journal Magazine as a “Game Changer” for her work bridging neuroscience, social justice and contemplative practices. In 2022, she was also named one of the "10 Most Powerful Women in Mindfulness" by Mindful Magazine. 

Katie Shillington, M.Sc., PhD

Post-Doctoral Fellow in Biology

Dr. Katie Shillington (she/her) completed her PhD in the Health Promotion stream of the Health and Rehabilitation Sciences graduate program at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She is a certified Motivational Interviewing coach (The Monarch System, Inc) and has instructed several undergraduate courses over the past few years, including Positive Psychology and Personal Determinants of Health. During her doctoral studies, Katie was the recipient of a national scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which funded her work exploring adults’ mental health, wellbeing, and prosocial behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. Katie was also the project coordinator for Leveraging Kindness, an event that brought together an international group of multidisciplinary students, faculty, and staff, inclusive of leading scholars in the field, who explored ways to bring a kindness framework into post-secondary education. In recognition of her academic performance, Katie was one of three recipients of the Governor General’s Gold Medal at Western University in 2023, one of the most prestigious awards that graduate scholars in Canada can receive. Her program of research focuses on resilience-promoting behaviours toward positive mental health, including kindness, prosocial behaviours, and other coping strategies during challenging times. Katie is passionate about using a strengths-based approach to explore how such interventions can be leveraged to improve the mental health and wellbeing of minoritized students. In doing so, she is committed to creating equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible spaces and has prioritized this in her research and teaching practices to date. 

Helen Ho, MPA

Luke Carmichael Valmadrid

Empathy and Social Justice Research Assistant

Luke is a second-year medical student in the PRIME-Health Equity program at UCSD. He received his M.P.H. in Health Equity, Social Justice, and Human Rights from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and B.S. degrees in Violin-Performance and Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was the former violist of the Perlman Ensemble and a First Wave Hip-Hop Scholar (8th Co.). Like his specialty interests, his research interests remain wide, including clinical and statistical projects in opthalmology, rheumatology, psychiatry, and ongoing work as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Inclusive Excellence (CAPIE) Scholar. He also enjoys qualitative research, biking, listening to IU, cooking tofu, video games and writing poetry, with an upcoming chapbook to be published with Penumbra Press this year.