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Tina Aswani Omprakash: A Journey From Inflammatory Bowel Disease Patient, to Patient Advocate, to Master of Public Health Student

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, School

Tina Aswani Omprakash

When Crohn’s disease forced Tina Aswani Omprakash to leave a career on Wall Street, she began looking for a way to rebuild her life. Having navigated the surgeries, the health disparities, and the South Asian cultural stigmas—shame and taboo—associated with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) for more than a decade, Ms. Aswani Omprakash knew she had insights on IBD that could be beneficial for people of color facing the same challenges.

That revelation led her to the Master of Public Health (MPH) degree program at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

“I chose the program in part because I had heard Mount Sinai was accommodating of students with disabilities, and that was important to me in rebuilding my career and self-worth,” she explains.

“I gained a knowledge base that expanded my understanding of the disease and gave me insights to approach public health not just from my own personal experience, but from a broader health care perspective.”

A long-time patient advocate and public speaker who has presented at many domestic and international gastroenterology conferences, Ms. Aswani Omprakash is pursuing the General Public Health track to better understand the needs of different patient populations and develop her research skills. In 2020, she conducted a qualitative study, sponsored by the biotechnology company Genentech, on the unmet needs among diverse patients living with IBD. Her abstract was published in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases and presented at the 2021 Crohn’s and Colitis Congress.

“This was a groundbreaking study in that it was the first patient advocate-led study in the IBD space. I hand-picked and recruited patients of various races, ethnicities, genders, age groups, sexual orientations, and geographical locations via my social media presence,” Ms. Aswani Omprakash says. “Although the conclusions we came to were expected, the study helped to legitimize the needs and concerns of patients—such as more access to mental health care, improved access to specialists who understand the complexities of the disease, and better medications that target the disease in different communities.”

For her MPH Applied Practice Experience, Ms. Aswani Omprakash worked with the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust on two projects: a guidebook for caregivers of children and adolescents with Crohn’s disease, created with the National Alliance of Caregiving, and a series of web pages detailing surgical treatment options, which she developed with the United Ostomy Associations of America. “These resources are designed to fill an information gap among health care providers and patients living with IBD, and to change perceptions of surgery as a last resort,” Ms. Aswani Omprakash says. “The fact that they are written by a patient who is earning an MPH further enhances the content.”

Nils Hennig, MD, PhD, MPH, Director of Mount Sinai’s Graduate Program in Public Health says: “Tina Aswani Omprakash is a great example of our patient-focused approach to public health. Proximity to the populations we serve is fundamental. The study of Public Health at Mount Sinai goes beyond mere analysis and repair: it offers choices, it provides a human touch, and it may ultimately help reestablish human dignity.”

Ms. Aswani Omprakash has been completing the program one course at a time and will graduate in December 2022. “This has been an incredible experience,” she says. “I gained a knowledge base that expanded my understanding of the disease and gave me insights to approach public health not just from my own personal experience, but from a broader health care perspective.”

To learn more about Ms. Aswani Omprakash’s patient advocacy journey, go to her blog at ownyourcrohns.com.

What Is the Delta Variant and Why Is It a Concern for Those Who Are Not Vaccinated

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, Vaccines, Your Health

One of the latest terms to emerge from the pandemic is the Delta variant. This variant appears to be more contagious than previous variants and has become more common in the United States.

In this Q&A, Sean Liu, MD, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at the Icahn School of Medicine, says the spread of this variant is concerning because of the number of people who remain unvaccinated. Those who become infected with this variant pose an elevated risk to household members who are not vaccinated and to others they come in contact with, such as those with compromised immune systems—which includes those with chronic medical conditions and the elderly—who are not able to fight infections as easily as most. Dr. Liu is part of the team of experts at Mount Sinai who are at the forefront of research into vaccines and who are also on the front lines treating patients and helping to limit the spread of the virus in the New York metropolitan area.

Sean Liu, MD, PhD

What is the Delta variant?

All viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, will evolve over time. It is normal for a virus to change a little bit when it makes copies of itself, or replicates. These changes are called mutations. The virus with one or more new mutations is referred to as a variant. Genetic variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been emerging and circulating around the world throughout the COVID 19 pandemic. There are six variants of concern circulating in the United States; the Delta variant is one of these circulating variants. The Delta variant was first detected in December 2020, and recently this variant has been detected in more than 80 countries, and in all 50 states.

Why is there a concern over this variant?

The variants of concern show evidence of at least one of the following five properties:

The variant may spread more easily from person to person.
The variant may lead to more severe disease, including increased hospitalizations or deaths.
The variant may be significantly harder to combat by antibodies generated during a previous infection or vaccination.
Treatments or vaccines may show reduced effectiveness against the variant.
The variant may evade diagnostic detection.

The Delta variant, specifically, has three of these properties, one being increased transmissibility. There is a 1.6-fold increase in the odds of household transmissions for the Delta variant compared with the Alpha variant, also known as the UK variant.

Why is the issue of transmissibility so important?

The fact that this strain can spread so quickly means is that you have a higher likelihood of spreading the Delta variant if infected. As clinicians, we see a lot of COVID-19 spread throughout families. It’s very devastating among households, and this variant specifically has this increased transmissibility within a household. People who are unvaccinated are really putting their family members, or those in their household, at increased risk for severe disease, especially if they too are unvaccinated.

For those who are fully vaccinated, does the Delta variant pose a risk?

It is important to remember that the goal of the COVID-19 vaccines is to prevent severe infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. The mRNA-based vaccines are about 95 percent effective against hospitalization for COVID-19, with either one or two doses. Studies suggest that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduced the odds of symptomatic disease from the Delta variant, which means getting mildly sick, by 36 percent after one dose and 88 percent after two doses. There is, however, no available data about asymptomatic or mild infections with the Delta variant in fully vaccinated people, which means that people can get infected but not show any symptoms. Also, we know that people with underlying medical conditions have died from COVID-19, even after being fully vaccinated. As a result, the Delta variant creates a major concern if there are fully vaccinated people who are in close contact with family or household members or with people who are immunocompromised or have not been vaccinated, including children.

What about those who are not vaccinated?

If you have not been vaccinated yet, you should seriously consider doing so now. People who have not been vaccinated have a much greater risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID-19, especially the Delta variant. Meanwhile, people who are not vaccinated, or who are immunocompromised, should continue to use masks, socially distance to avoid infection especially if you don’t know the status of the individuals around you. If you’re unsure of getting vaccinated, I would encourage you to have discussions with medical professionals who may provide reliable information about the benefits of vaccination. Currently, 44 percent of New York City residents of all ages have not been vaccinated and 34 percent of adults have not been vaccinated in New York City. The distribution of people getting vaccinated is not even. Check out the New York City Department of Health website for the latest information about vaccine availability and vaccination rates.

Why are vaccines important?

The COVID 19 pandemic is a global problem. While vaccines are becoming readily available in the United States, the majority of the world remains unvaccinated. And the pandemic will persist for months, and likely years. Vaccination is our primary means of ending the pandemic. Vaccines are safe and effective. Please consider getting vaccinated, if you are eligible.

Visit our website for COVID-19 vaccination information, appointments and resources

Mount Sinai Creates COVID-19 Vaccine for Low- and Middle-lncome Countries

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Research, School

An effective COVID-19 vaccine developed by scientists, from left, Florian Krammer, PhD; Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD; and Peter Palese, PhD, could help ease the shortage of vaccines available to low-and-middle-income countries.

The development of a safe, effective, and inexpensive COVID-19 vaccine that can easily be produced and distributed in low- and middle-income countries is underway at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where early phase 1 clinical testing in Vietnam and Thailand has shown positive results.

The vaccine is the brainchild of three renowned scientists at Mount Sinai—Peter Palese, PhD, Horace W. Goldsmith Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbiology; Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine and Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute; and Florian Krammer, PhD, Mount Sinai Professor in Vaccinology. By combining their expertise, the scientists—who previously developed a universal influenza vaccine—hope to bring closure to this deadly pandemic by providing less affluent countries with an accessible and cost-effective COVID-19 vaccine they can manufacture themselves.

To date, the World Health Organization has distributed only 90 million vaccine doses to 131 countries, far short of the number needed to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that leads to COVID-19. More contagious variants of the virus will continue to evolve and plague countries around the world as long as their populations remain unvaccinated. “When we protect other countries we protect ourselves, as well,” says Dr. Palese.

Dr. Krammer says, “In North America and Europe many people are getting vaccinated and the virus circulation is going down. But that is not the case in countries in Asia or Latin America, for example. Their COVID-19 case numbers are going up quickly. They need a vaccine and they don’t have access.”

Anticipating this need, Dr. Palese and his colleagues designed Mount Sinai’s COVID-19 vaccine to use the avian Newcastle virus (NDV), and constructed it similarly to an influenza virus vaccine, which can be manufactured in embryonated or fertilized chicken eggs.

Mount Sinai’s COVID-19 vaccine, which would require two doses, could be made using the same influenza vaccine production facilities that many countries already have in place.

The NDV-based vaccine is engineered to express the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. The construct is injected into an embryonated egg, the virus replicates, and the amplified vaccine virus is then collected, purified, and inactivated. According to Dr. Palese, the resulting vaccine is stable, extraordinarily immunogenic, and induces highly protective immune responses against SARS-CoV-2. Immunogenicity is a measure of the type of immune responses that a vaccine generates and their magnitude over time.

“The beauty of this vaccine is that it can be made using the same influenza vaccine production facilities that many countries already have” in place, Dr. Krammer says. Approximately three billion doses of flu vaccine are produced each year using embryonated eggs.

There are other advantages, as well. Mount Sinai’s Newcastle vector vaccine does not appear to cause any side effects, such as the low-grade fevers, headaches, or pain and swelling at the injection site that are associated with the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines. The vaccine can also be stored at the same temperature as a home refrigerator, whereas both mRNA vaccines require extra-cold temperatures found only in commercial-grade freezers.

Mount Sinai’s vaccine, says Dr. Palese, can “probably be produced for under one dollar per dose,” and will require two doses spread over 21 days. By comparison, the mRNA vaccines, which also require two doses spread over three to four weeks, cost roughly $50 per dose. To keep costs down, Mount Sinai has agreed to grant licenses for its intellectual property to low- and middle-income countries that produce the vaccine and forgo any royalties on its use.

Dr. Garcia-Sastre says, “Prior to COVID-19, we realized the potential of NDV-based vaccines and for several years optimized this vaccine vector to achieve optimal immunogenicity of the delivered antigen (or toxin). NDV-based vaccines not only have the potential to stop COVID-19 in countries that have no access to the existing SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, but could be easily tailored to stop future pandemics caused by novel pathogens.”

As phase 2 testing for the vaccine ramps up in Thailand and Vietnam, accelerated phase 1 trials are ongoing in Mexico and Brazil. The trial designs used in these countries should lead to rapid phase 3 results. So far, the scientists say they have been pleased with their phase 1 results and with the tests that have been conducted in animal models.

“You can say that in animals, the vaccine protects beautifully,” says Dr. Krammer. “There is preliminary immunogenicity data that suggests the vaccine induces very good neutralizing titers.”

It is not yet clear whether the current vaccine will need to be updated to protect against aggressive new variants, according to Dr. Krammer. “But if it’s needed, we can change and move quickly to a variant vaccine. It would not be complicated.”

With regard to safety, which is top priority in a phase 1 trial, Dr. Palese says, “We are passing with flying colors.”

Can the COVID-19 Vaccines Affect My Fertility?

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, Men's Health, Vaccines, Women's Health, Your Health

Worried young woman holding pregnancy test

Some men and women may be reluctant to get the COVID-19 vaccination because of concerns about fertility. You may be wondering if any of the vaccines used in the United States can have an effect on your sperm count, or on your eggs, embryo, or the pregnancy itself.

In this Q&A, Alan Copperman, MD, Director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility and Vice Chair of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Science at the Mount Sinai Health System, says the evidence shows that the vaccines do not pose a concern.

Update: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on September 29, 2021, strongly recommended COVID-19 vaccination either before or during pregnancy because the benefits of vaccination outweigh known or potential risks. Read more from the CDC

Does the COVID-19 vaccine affect my sperm count?

None of the COVID-19 vaccines in use in the United States affect sperm count or the sperm’s ability to move toward an egg (motility). It is true that contracting a severe case of COVID-19 can lower sperm count for a time. But studies show that the vaccine itself does not affect sperm. In fact, we recently completed a study looking at sperm donors around the country before and after getting the vaccine. We saw no change in count or motility.

Can the vaccine affect my ability to get pregnant and have a baby?

We have found that the COVID-19 vaccinations do not affect a woman’s fertility. Pregnancy involves a number of steps:

Your ovaries release an egg.
The egg travels through the fallopian tube to the womb (uterus).
Sperm fertilizes the egg as it travels.
The fertilized egg attaches to the inside of the uterus (implantation) and grows.

A problem at any one of these steps can lead to infertility. We’ve been studying women who have gone through several fertility cycles to see if any of the COVID-19 vaccines used in the United States affects any of these steps. We have found that:

The vaccine does not decrease egg production.
It doesn’t affect the ability to make an embryo.
It doesn’t affect a chromosomally normal embryo’s ability to grow in the uterus.

Will the COVID-19 vaccine have any effect on my pregnancy?

This is a good question because we’ve found that pregnant women who get COVID-19 tend to become very ill. That’s why we recommend taking the vaccine. As of now, three billion COVID-19 vaccinations have been administered, have of them to women, and we haven’t heard any reports of them affecting a woman’s pregnancy. We have also seen women getting the vaccine while undergoing in vitro fertilization—and it has had no effect on their outcomes. In fact, we have found that the vaccine not only protects the pregnant woman, but it keeps them safe at vulnerable times, such as when they deliver—and the fetus gets some immunity as well. We hypothesize that the vaccine prevents severe illness in these babies.

Should I get the COVID-19 vaccine if I’m planning a pregnancy in the near future?

The best time to get the vaccine is as soon as it becomes available to you. You may feel tired after the shot, and you may have short-term symptoms like fever. Some people have an allergic reaction to the vaccine, but that is very rare. We definitely recommend getting the COVID-19 vaccine to protect you, your pregnancy, and your infant.

If I’m already pregnant should I get the vaccine?

Safety data from around the world shows that women taking the vaccine during pregnancy have seen no effect on their pregnancy. The vaccine has shown itself to be safe and effective. As a result, all the major organizations involved with women’s health care—including the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—are strongly advocating that people who are pregnant get the vaccine.

Which vaccine is best for a pregnant woman?

There’s no data suggesting that any one of the vaccines is better than any of the others for pregnant women. We know that the effectiveness against preventing disease seems a little bit higher in the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna), but all the vaccines that have been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are up to 99 percent effective in preventing severe disease and death. Get whatever vaccine is most readily available to you.

What should I do if I have questions about the vaccine and my fertility?

If you have any questions, ask your health care provider. You can also check the online guidelines from organizations like the World Health Organization and the FDA. There is a lot of great information out there to help us fight back against this pandemic.

Get more COVID-19 vaccine information from Mount Sinai

A Major Breakthrough and Potential New Treatment for Children With an Inflammatory Blood Disease

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Research

Miriam Merad, MD, PhD

A 17-year quest to understand Langerhans-cell histiocytosis (LCH)—an inflammatory blood disease that mostly affects children and can result in dementia and death—has led researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and their colleagues in Texas to a transformational discovery and a potential new treatment. Their findings were published in May in Nature Medicine.

The team, led by Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Icahn Mount Sinai, and Carl E. Allen, MD, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics, Hematology-Oncology, at Baylor College of Medicine, found that individuals with LCH have a mutation that puts a subset of white blood cells into a state called senescence. In this state, the cells stop multiplying as they normally would, express a pro-survival gene, and begin producing inflammatory molecules.

Lesions, a hallmark of the disease, form wherever the inflammation occurs, on the skin and in various organs including the brain and central nervous system, manifesting differently in each patient and causing a range of severity. Roughly one in 100,000 children in the United States develops LCH each year, putting it on par with the incidence of pediatric Hodgkin lymphoma, the third most common cancer in children. LCH appears to be most prevalent in the Middle East and countries such as China.

Understanding the role senescence plays in LCH has enabled the researchers to find a potential treatment that “attacks the cause of the problem,” says Dr. Merad. “We have a therapeutic molecule that can get at this pathway and block the ability of these senescent cells to survive.” When the researchers tested the molecule in animal models and on human cells they found the diseased cells were “super-addicted to this survival signal. So now we have a way of blocking the survival signal.”

Plans are underway, she adds, to launch an international, multi-site clinical trial in September, in conjunction with a pharmaceutical sponsor and the National Institutes of Health. Details will be released when the contracts are formalized.

If successful, Dr. Merad says the therapeutic molecule would replace the use of chemotherapy, the current standard of care, which fails to work in the majority of cases. Chemotherapy helps to eliminate some of the inflammation, she says, but it also kills healthy cells and is unable to reach the diseased cells.

Even with the latest breakthrough, LCH remains a baffling disease. It is not inherited, and there appears to be only one mutation. “It’s very unique,” says Dr. Merad. “We don’t know the cause or what makes some kids more at risk.” Upcoming clinical trials should help shed more light on the disease mechanisms.

Drs. Merad and Allen have been collaborating on LCH research since 2004, when they met at a conference in Greece, which was sponsored by the father of a child with a severe case of LCH, who was frustrated by the lack of scientific knowledge. Five years later, Drs. Merad and Allen were the first to describe LCH as a disease of the hematic system—blood vessels that carry blood throughout the body—which originates in the bone marrow. Prior to that, LCH was categorized as a type of skin cancer.

“This disease should be classified as an inflammatory hematological disease,” says Dr. Merad. “There’s no proliferation; the cell never metastasizes. What we’ve discovered in this latest paper is that the mutation puts the cells into a state that is not cancerous, but one in which the cells are fighting not to expand. They start producing a lot of inflammatory molecules because they sense there is danger. This inflammation is the cause of most of the symptoms.”

She says the next piece of the LCH puzzle will be figuring out how to prevent the disease from causing neurodegenerative damage.

The 17-year journey to reach this latest discovery has been a “story of friendship, commitment, and perseverance,” says Dr. Merad. It was her mentor, the late Nobel laureate Ralph M. Steinman, MD, who first asked her to join him in studying LCH and brought her to the 2004 conference where she met Dr. Allen. She became committed to understanding the baffling disease after being greeted at the door by the organizer’s teenage son, who had LCH, and by his father, who had enlisted some of the world’s leading scientists to find answers.

“What’s beautiful is that this group we formed in 2004 (with Dr. Allen’s lab) is as strong today as it was then,” says Dr. Merad. “We never stopped working on these questions. Science takes perseverance. We start with the question, and we dig and dig until we have something solid and then we put it out there. No matter what it takes we continue to work on it.”

Mount Sinai Creates LGBTQ+ Medical Fellowship That Will Serve as a National Model of Care

Updated on Nov 14, 2025 | Engagement, Featured

The Mount Sinai Health System in 2020 launched a pioneering one-year medical fellowship program specializing in LGBTQ+ health. Its mission was to create a new primary care specialty that combined expertise in disciplines such as preventive medicine, infectious diseases, gynecology, endocrinology, psychiatry, and research, and provided holistic care to this minority population.

The American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation was so supportive of the idea that it provided Mount Sinai with funding to cover the fellowship for a second year—which begins in July—and develop a model program for future LGBTQ+ fellowships around the country. Recently, the AMA announced plans to fund 10 new fellowships in 2022, many in the South and other areas of the country where LGBTQ+ patients have more limited access to high-quality health care.

Michael M. Gaisa, MD, PhD,

“There are particular needs, both psychosocial and medical, that arise from being members of this community, and I think, until now, that has not been appreciated to the extent that it deserves to be,” says Michael M. Gaisa, MD, PhD, Director of Mount Sinai’s LGBTQ+ Health Care Fellowship, and Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

One of the fellowships’ goals, Dr. Gaisa says, is to “educate more knowledgeable, competent, and sensitive providers on a national scale.” Mount Sinai’s new fellowship is a “blend of subspecialties that have traditionally been siloed.” Typically, he adds, doctors do not “complete their conventional residencies or fellowships with the breadth of experience bundled into our LGBTQ+ fellowship curriculum, so that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”

In July, Roy Zucker, MD, will be the first physician to have completed Mount Sinai’s fellowship. An internal medicine and infectious disease doctor who practices in Tel Aviv, Dr. Zucker started the fellowship in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic last summer. Admittedly, the timing “wasn’t perfect,” he says. But as New York began to open up he was able to transition from providing telehealth to in-person care. He also spent the year conducting research, and working with Mount Sinai Innovation Partners to create an app that would make it easier for gay men to access PrEP, medication that prevents the spread of HIV, through Mount Sinai’s MyChart patient portal.

Dr. Zucker is active on social media and uses his platform to promote the need for health screenings, vaccinations, and harm reduction from recreational drug use among LGBTQ+ people. In June, he held community-wide discussions about harm reduction in drug use in advance of the New York City Pride Parade.

In general, Dr. Zucker says, lesbian women tend not to seek out preventive care. As a result, they do not receive the routine mammograms and Pap tests that would enable them to be diagnosed at earlier stages of breast or cervical cancer when they can be treated more successfully. “In this population there’s many more cancers just because of a lack of screening,” he says.

Roy Zucker, MD

Doctors also need to be educated about LGBTQ+ health, he adds. Some physicians mistakenly assume that lesbians do not have to be screened for cervical cancer because they are not having sex with men. In addition, doctors do not always test gay men accurately for chlamydia and gonorrhea. They perform a standalone urine test instead of swabbing other exposed anatomic sites, such as the rectum and throat, and miss the majority of positive cases.

One mission of the new fellowship is to “export expertise and awareness to other departments within Mount Sinai and on a broader scale,” says Dr. Gaisa. “Hopefully, we can change some existing paradigms and shape awareness and standard clinical practice in a more meaningful way.”

Fellows will work closely with the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center, and departments that are as seemingly far afield as geriatrics. “One day I work on transgender medicine, another day it’s LGBTQ+ psychiatry,” Dr. Zucker says. “I work with addiction medicine, and three days a week I work in HIV and sexually transmitted diseases clinics. For many years, we had physicians who always took care of the LGBTQ+ community—they were called ‘LGBTQ-friendly doctors.’ There was never proper training for that.”

Dr. Zucker’s connection with Mount Sinai began in early 2019, when he arrived from Tel Aviv to begin a one-month observership in HIV training with Antonio Urbina, MD, Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at Icahn Mount Sinai. When Dr. Zucker inquired why Mount Sinai did not have a fellowship specializing in LGBTQ+ health, Dr. Urbina put him in touch with David C. Thomas, MD, Interim Chair of the Department of Medicine at Icahn Mount Sinai; and David L. Reich, MD, President of The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens. That is when the wheels started turning. In 2020, Dr. Zucker returned to Mount Sinai as the inaugural fellow.

He and Dr. Gaisa are aware of only one other LGBTQ+ medical fellowship in the world, a program at the University of California, Los Angeles, which started a year before Mount Sinai’s.

“You say to yourself, ‘I’m sure this program already exists,’ and you start looking and say, ‘Wow, where is it?’” Dr. Zucker says. “This is pioneering. We’re creating the next ambassadors for this specialty called LGBTQ+ medicine and we’re bringing it to the world. One or two people doing this each year is not enough. It’s about passing it forward.”