Dr. Alexander Weickhardt Receives the 2024-2025 Bridges Curriculum – Foundations 1 and 2 Teaching Award

It is our great pleasure to announce another highly deserved teaching award from the UCSF School of Medicine!

Dr. Alexander Weickhardt (PGY3) has received the 2024-2025 Bridges Curriculum – Foundations 1 and 2 Teaching Award for Excellence in Small Group Instruction by Student Instructor. This is a student-nominated award that reflects the high esteem and deep appreciation that MS1s and MS2s feel for exemplary preclerkship teaching done by a fellow, resident, or senior medical student. This is Alex’s second win, as he also received this award in 2023 – a truly remarkable accomplishment!  Only one award for small group teaching is available to non-faculty instructors.

Alex is committed to medical student education and teaches the same group of students longitudinally, with the goal of covering all 20 pathology content areas taught in the small group setting. This includes a diverse set of topics, such as obstructive and restrictive lung disease, glomerular disease, leukemia, lymphoma, placental pathology, and neurodegenerative disease (to name just a few), and requires not only broad content knowledge but also excellent teaching skills.

In addition, Alex is working with Drs. Sandra Perez, Dana Balitzer, and Kristie White to develop a curriculum that will educate medical students about errors in pathology. He interviewed learners, faculty, and staff in several disciplines to assess what future clinicians and pathologists need to know about pathology-related errors and to identify knowledge gaps. Important learning topics for students include pre-analytic (e.g., providing clinical context), analytic (specimen processing), and post-analytic (e.g., communicating/acting on critical values) phases, in addition to promoting an overall safety culture where learners are empowered to raise concerns. Ultimately, he will design and implement a lesson addressing these topics.

Please join us in congratulating Alex for this highly deserved award, which he will receive at the UCSF School of Medicine Teaching Awards ceremony on October 29.