Primary Care Population Medicine

Master’s thesis: “Efficacy of Child Abuse Evaluations for Infants with Possible Subdural Hemorrhage Identified on Cranial Ultrasound Completed for Macrocephaly.”

Residency: Obstetrics/Gynecology at Johns Hopkins Hospital

Fresh out of undergrad, Gabrielle Jude “felt really inspired … to do something with a service component before entering medical school,” she says. So, she spent two years teaching secondary math in a low-resource community in Baltimore as part of Teach For America, an experience she says “definitely” prepared her for medical school.

The PC-PM Program was a big reason Gabrielle chose Brown. Despite “feeling nervous and having questions like, ‘Is it different from the way everyone else learns?’” her LIC experience exceeded her expectations. She was able to follow patients over multiple different specialties, and mentors from annual exams in the clinic to deliveries and operating rooms, giving her a “full picture” of obstetrics and gynecology. 

“I feel like a lot of medical school and residency is very much inpatient based, which is not a realistic picture of what your life will be,” she says. “Without LIC and more outpatient time, I wouldn’t have gotten to see all that went into being an ob/gyn.

“In a lot of ways, ob/gyn is primary care,” Gabrielle adds. “Lots of [young people] only see their ob/gyn because they’re otherwise very healthy. It’s like another secret way that we get to serve as primary care physicians.” She says that her teaching experience equipped her with skills like flexibility, empathy, and communication, all of which she applies to her daily life in medicine.

A passion for education permeates all of Gabrielle’s endeavors. While taking the Population Medicine course in her third year, she partnered with Clínica Esperanza’s gyn clinic and Spanish-speaking medical students to develop a health education curriculum. Despite not speaking Spanish herself, she says she managed to “pull everyone’s strengths into making this project work.”

As an LIC fellow, Gabrielle realized that “something that was missing was a longitudinal relationship between the classes.” She initiated PC-PM Families, which brought together one person from each class year in a nonstructured way to facilitate a robust peer mentorship program. She says that coming into PC-PM, she would have really appreciated having fourth-year students to count on for support and advice. She’s glad that future cohorts will have these small groups to turn to and is “excited to see where it goes.” 

Now Gabrielle is going back home to Maryland: she matched into obstetrics/gynecology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She’s “really excited to return to the community,” she says, and calls it an “all-around perfect situation.”