Photo credit: Kyle Dykes/UC San Diego Health Sciences

FEATURE

Via UC San Diego Today: The average emergency room wait in the United States is 2 hours and 40 minutes. At UC San Diego Health, emergency medicine physician Rachna Subramony, MD, understands the stress, anxiety, and pain patients face while waiting. Clinicians, too, experience strain from high patient loads, life-threatening trauma, and the unpredictability of care.

It’s this reality—and countless similar scenarios—that inspired the creation of the UC San Diego Health: Sanford Compassionate Communication Academy Fellowship. Now in its fourth year, the program has earned widespread acclaim and draws participants from an increasing number of medical departments across our health system, from OB/GYN and pediatrics to neurology and biomedical informatics. 

A recent feature in UC San Diego Today highlights the Center for Compassionate Communication’s innovative approach to addressing the "compassion crisis" in America through the Fellowship's arts- and humanities-based curriculum. In the piece, Center leadership, Evonne Kaplan-Liss, MD, MPH, Val Lantz-Gefroh, MFA, and Gary Buckholz, MD, explain how theater, storytelling, journalism, and perspective-taking have the power to transform how clinicians communicate, foster empathy, and build stronger relationships with patients, colleagues, and themselves.

Photo credit: UC San Diego Health

The fellowship is offered twice a year to several dozen UC San Diego-affiliated physicians, nurses and advanced practice providers. In addition, several teaching artists—including actors, stage directors and designers, visual artists and dancers—serve as fellows, helping foster meaningful collaboration between the arts and medicine. Their unique perspectives allow medical professionals to recognize their communication blind spots. And by training alongside clinicians, the artists gain insights into the challenges faced by the profession and how their craft can be adapted to health care settings to build interdisciplinary teams of educators.

Evidence of the Fellowship's impact is clear: a recent study in Academic Medicine demonstrates measurable improvements in clinician communication and patient engagement during and after participation in the program.

To date, more than 85 UC San Diego Health professionals have graduated from the UC San Diego Health: Sanford Compassionate Communication Academy Fellowship. The Center for Compassionate Communication is currently accepting applications and fellow nominations for its Spring 2026 cohort. 

SPOTLIGHT

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently sat down with Sanford Institute Endowed Professor Eric Garland, PhD, to explore how mindfulness meditation can be as effective as opioids in treating chronic pain—without any of the side effects. In the episode, they break down the science behind how leaning into pain, rather than avoiding, can actually rewire the brain and provide lasting relief.

MEDIA

Sanford Institute Founding Director William Mobley, MD, PhD, sat down with KPBS to discuss empathy in the age of polarization. In the piece, he warns that turning away from suffering may feel like self-preservation, but it dulls our emotions and humanity, and diminishes our own capacity for compassion and connection. He also contends that feeling empathy and acting on it are not just pivotal to our health but to humanity's salvation. 

RESEARCH

A new UC San Diego study led by the Center for Empathy and Technology has found that school-based online surveillance services, which use AI to monitor students around the clock, may disproportionately impact students relying on school devices and put marginalized groups at greater risk of bias—raising calls for stronger oversight.

EVENTS

Next month, the Sanford Institute is flying to Baltimore, MD, for the Gold Humanism Summit. Founding Institute Director Dr. William Mobley will join Dr. Sean Evans of UC San Diego School of Medicine and Dr. Rolando DeLeon of Nova Southeastern University for a plenary session on centering empathy for self and others in medical education curricula.

RESEARCH

Intended for UC San Diego students, trainees, and early-career researchers, the Sanford Institute's Research Fellowship provides financial support for basic and/or applied empathy and compassion research. 

Today, we are pleased to announce our five 2025-26 Research Fellows (pictured below from left to right), whose second-year projects span diverse topics—from applying generative AI to enhance empathic communication in medicine to studying how the brain processes emotional cues in speech, and beyond. 

🔹 Nikki Keisler—Anterior Cingulate Encoding of State-matching and Allogrooming in Mice 

🔹 Greg Depow—Wise Empathy in Medical Practice 

🔹 Lauren Ostrowski—Neural processing of paralinguistic features and emotional content in speech
 
🔹 Manas Bedmutha—EmpathIQ: Advancing Empathic and Compassionate Communication in Medical Training with Generative AI

🔹 Mariel Micael—Role of Astrocyte-Neuron Communication in Observational Fear Learning and Memory

Learn more about our 2025-26 Research Fellows at the jump, and stay tuned to our social media pages for updates on their studies in the coming months.

NEWS

— Early bird registration is open for the 2026 Lead With Compassion Workshop, an arts- and humanities-based leadership training for health care professionals and medical educators to foster empathy and compassion. Save your spot now — this workshop will sell out!

— UC San Diego named #4 public university in the U.S. in academic ranking of world universities. 

— Registration is open for the 2025 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, taking place in San Diego November 15-19. (We'll be there!)

— "Two Psychiatrists: A Closer Look at Empathy," featuring Helen Riess, MD, published in The New York Times this month, shedding light on the fact empathy is not just a sentimental feeling, but an emotional resonance that can be taught. 

RESOURCES

Advances in brain imaging and the neurosciences allow previously unimaginable insights into the workings of the human mind, but not necessarily how to translate that knowledge into a benefit for patients or providers. This is the root of our work at the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion.

Watch the recorded expert panel, hosted by The Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare CEO Michael Gustafson, MD, MBA, and explore our free supporting resources. Learn how we are harnessing the neurobiology of empathy and compassion to create game-changing initiatives for medical education and patient care at UC San Diego School of Medicine and beyond.