New Archives Intern: Maopeli Ali

We’re happy to welcome new intern Maopeli Ali to Archives & Special Collections. Born and raised in San Francisco, Maopeli is currently a sophomore at Kenyon College in Ohio where he is pursuing a major in biology with a minor in Latin. At Kenyon, he also participates in club rugby and is a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. Maopeli is a seasoned intern; he has previously worked at various institutions in the Bay Area, including an architecture firm, the Geology Department of the California Academy of Science, and the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). Maopeli is very ambitious, and is proud to be a First Generation to College student. He plans to attend graduate school after completing his undergraduate studies to pursue a Criminal Justice Master Degree in Forensic Science. His career goal is to become a forensics investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Portrait of Maopeli Ali with San Francisco in the background.

New Archives intern Maopeli Ali

Maopeli comes to us as part of the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute Summer Research Program. “This program is designed to provide an opportunity for High School and Undergraduate students to immerse themselves in the world of basic and/or clinical research for three months during the summer. The program pairs students with one or two CHORI principal investigators who serve as mentors, guiding the students through the design and testing of their own hypotheses and methodology development. At the end of the summer, students present their research to their peers just as any professional researcher would do.” As a CHORI intern, Maopeli is mentored by Dr. Aimee Medeiros from the UCSF Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine and Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections.

Maopeli will be working on digitizing medical records using our newly-implemented scanning lab purchased with funds from UCSF’s RAP Shared Instrument program. He will then have the opportunity to work with some of this data to formulate a research question which can be addressed by the records.

The Archives are a new experience for Maopeli, whose previous work has mostly focused on biology. He is excited to work in this context, and explore ways in which this study can both help the archives and increase awareness within the health sciences fields about the wealth of historical medical data which is available in the archives and records of large health science universities like UCSF.

Archive Your Pride Button Making

In celebration of SF Pride 2017, the UCSF Archives and the Makers Lab are hosting a button making pop up event! Join us tomorrow, June 20th, from 12noon-2pm in the UCSF Library Makers Lab and create buttons that represent your pride. We’ll have reproductions of archival material, including photographs, flyers and ephemera from LGBTQ community and health advocacy groups, historical marches and events, and more. Get creative and celebrate diversity with us!

REGISTER HERE

A sneak peek at some of the images, courtesy of our interns!

Special thanks to our colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Archives for inspiring us with their own Pride Month button making event and historical display!

Digital Collection of Selma Dritz, Epidemiologist and AIDS Researcher

We’ve started work on our NHPRC grant project, “Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections.” Throughout the project, I’ll be posting regular updates on Brought to Light.

For our first installment, we’re highlighting the new digital collection of Selma Dritz. Selma K. Dritz, MD, MPH, served as Assistant Director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control and Chief of the Division of Occupational Health of the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) from 1967-1984. She played a seminal role in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area, tracking cases and collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UCSF to help establish the etiology and epidemiology of the disease. She worked to educate gay and straight people about AIDS and its prevention.

The digital collection includes photographs, correspondence, research, ephemera, and other selected material.

The Dritz papers in part document the relationships Dritz cultivated with other physicians, researchers, and community advocates. For instance, during her tenure at SFDPH, Dritz developed a close working relationship with Randy Shilts, author of And the Band Played On, a groundbreaking work that chronicled the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The digital collection includes thank you cards Shilts wrote to Dritz and the program for Shilts’s memorial service and Dritz’s handwritten notes she prepared for it following his death in 1994.

To view the Dritz digital collection, visit Calisphere.org. There you can also view other digitized material from collections in the AIDS History Project, including the San Francisco AIDS Foundation records and AIDS Ephemera collection.

If you would like to research the Dritz papers (MSS 2009-04), please make an appointment with us.

New Intern

Anida Hodzic

Anida Hodzic is a senior undergrad at the University of San Francisco, who will be graduating in the fall, 2017. She was born in Bosnia and spent time in Berlin before moving to San Francisco.  She is majoring Art History and Arts Management with a minor in Classical Studies. She enjoys antiquity, from art to literature, with a strong interest in Greco-Roman culture and society. Before studying art history, she was working towards an International Business degree. Her time as a teacher’s assistant for her art history professor at City College of San Francisco helped her figure out that business was not her calling. Since then she has interned at Schein & Schein, an antique map and rare book gallery. Currently she is looking forward to delving into historical medical artifact at UCSF. She is extremely excited to spend time at the UCSF archives and hopes to soak up as much information as possible. Anida will be designing and building the online component for the archives exhibit, University of California Medical Service in World War I.

Introducing “A Century of Health”

This is a guest post by Zach Bleemer. Zach is a Research Associate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, where he directs the University of California Cliometric History Project, and a Graduate Intern in Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the UC Office of the President. 

A few months ago, I gave a lecture entitled “A History of Higher Education in California: A Big Data Approach” at the UCSF Archives. The lecture presented a large trove of newly-collected UC student records from the first half of the 20th century, including a complete register of University of California undergraduate and graduate students—their names, home towns, degrees, and years of graduation—from 1893 to 1946. These records enable descriptive analysis like Figure 1, which extends well-documented trends in college major selection back to the late 19th century (for UC Berkeley).

A recent Topic Brief published by the Institutional Research and Academic Planning Group (IRAP) at the UC Office of the President integrated this historical data with contemporary records of UC-trained medical professionals. Figure 2 uses California state medical license records from 1920 and 2016 to map the towns in which UC-trained doctors practice medicine, color-coding the towns by the doctors’ gender. Between 10 and 15 percent of UC medical students in the first decade of the 20th century were women, but women accounted for more than half of UC medical students in the first decade of the 21st century.

We also published an interactive map feature displaying the more than 850 cities and towns in which health professionals—doctors, dentists, optometrists, and veterinarians—trained by the University of California since 1999 currently practice, including both former graduate students as well as former residents (constructed by merging student and employment records with 2016 state licensing records). Toggles allow the viewer to restrict the map by UC campus, professional discipline, ethnicity, and level of training, and the map is color-coded by the professionals’ gender. The map displays both the demographic and geographic diversity of UC’s health-oriented graduates, who work in more than 60 percent of California towns with any health professionals. The interactive display also includes bar charts showing the number of health professionals who graduated UC each year (by campus and demographic group).

Both of these projects are part of a new initiative, A Century of Health, which aims to visualize and analyze the long-run contributions of UC’s health-oriented graduate schools to the state of California and beyond. Future components of this initiative will extend to pharmacists, nurses, physicians assistants, and more, and will leverage both new and very old sources of data, partly thanks to the UCSF Archives. The most exciting and comprehensive source of data is historical student transcripts housed in the UCSF Registrar, which we have recently concluded digitizing. A Century of Health aims to provide new insight into the University of California’s role in fostering wellness, economic mobility, and gender/ethnic equality across California by expanding, deepening, and repackaging information detailing the ubiquity of the University of California’s health-oriented graduate schools. To keep up with new developments, check the UC ClioMetric History Project’s website, or contact zachary.bleemer@ucop.edu.