Rebecca Wolinsky Named 2022 Pisacano Scholar

Rebecca Wolinsky, a fourth-year medical student, has been named a 2022 Pisacano Scholar, one of ten awardees selected by the board of directors of the Pisacano Leadership Foundation (PLF), Inc.

Recipients of the award are outstanding medical students who have committed to the specialty of family medicine. They possess demonstrable leadership skills, superior academic achievement, strong communication skills, identifiable character and integrity, and a noteworthy level of community service engagement. The scholarship, valued at approximately $28,000 for each recipient, provides educational programs, leadership training, and funding for fourth-year medical students identified as future leaders in family medicine.

Originally from Houston, Wolinsky earned her BA in Africana studies and community health from Brown University, where she received the Department of Africana Studies

Ida B. Wells Award for Community Activism and Undergraduate Scholarship.

While at Brown, driven by health equity and racial justice principles, Wolinsky worked to address structural determinants of health through Health Leads Providence, including work in the Providence refugee community and completion of an Africana studies honors thesis analyzing impacts of racism in medicine on US refugee healthcare.

Wolinsky then completed Bryn Mawr College’s postbaccalaureate premedical program and worked at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as a medical practice assistant in a gynecology clinic that specializes in transgender health. Subsequently, she matriculated at Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and, already committed to a career in family medicine, was selected as a National Health Service Corps scholarship recipient for all four years.

At Chobanian & Avedisian SOM, Wolinsky cofounded Creating Leadership and Education to Address Racism, a now-annual enrichment series featuring experts in the field, and also cofounded the school’s Racism in Medicine Vertical Integration Group, which performed a detailed review of the MD program curriculum and developed recommendations for addressing racism in medicine. Committed to reproductive justice, she organized workshops to expand abortion access, led the largest delegation of medical students at the ROE Act Hearing, and was the sole medical