Dr. Jehan Budak was voted by her peers as the winner of the 2021 Bruce C. Gilliland Award for Excellence in Teaching of Residents and Fellows.
The Gilliland Award is awarded annually to the faculty member who is actively engaged in clinical and didactic training or in the implementation of a graduate medical education curriculum. The winner must have shown evidence of excellence over time and must have served for at least 3 years within the University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM) as a teacher of residents/fellows.
Dr. Budak is originally from Long Beach, California, where she was a substitute teacher before going to medical school. She has won nearly every teaching award there is while completing her Internal Medicine residency in the UWSOM and during her Infectious Diseases fellowship at UCSF. She is well known for her intellectual rigor and clinical judgement and for her ability to synthesize the literature with her own experience when rendering care or teaching a room of learners. This degree of expertise is usually attained after many years of practice but Dr. Budak arrived at this point in only a couple of years.
Currently, Dr. Budak is the director of the UW IM Residency HIV Pathway as well as the Director of Clinic Education at Madison Clinic for the Infectious Disease Fellows. Over her very short career, she has developed a local and national reputation in her field by creating the clinical curriculum for teaching HIV and HIV primary care and has formally published a curricula as the Associate Editor of the National HIV Curriculum developed at UW, a CDC supported project used by clinicians nationwide to learn HIV care.
Congratulations to Dr. Budak who has worked tirelessly to engage all of those with whom she interacts to be better teachers and caregivers, not through just what she says but through her actions. We should all aspire to his unparalleled commitment to teaching, innovation, mentoring, and patient care.