Profession
Doctors honored for role as mentors
■ Two teaching physicians and a professor of nursing received this year's awards from the Joy McCann Foundation.
By Myrle Croasdale — Posted June 14, 2004
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Kara Levri, MD, MPH, is finishing a two-year fellowship in academic family medicine and is looking for a job in the National Health Service Corps. She wouldn't have known about the corps if not for her mentor, Jeannette South-Paul, MD, chair of family medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Dr. South-Paul is an outstanding mentor, said the Joy McCann Foundation, which awarded her $150,000. Also recognized with $150,000 awards were Kathleen Foley, MD, professor of neurology, neuroscience and clinical pharmacology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City, and Mary Naylor, PhD, RN, director of the Rand/Hartford Center for Interdisciplinary Geriatric Health Care Research and a nursing professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.
This is the second year the foundation, a private family philanthropy, has given the awards. Dr. South-Paul created a mentoring program for minority medical students while at the Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences. She continues to mentor family medicine fellows at Pittsburgh.
"I'm a product of 26-plus years of military background," Dr. South-Paul said. "I feel I have a solemn responsibility to contribute to this world. Everybody needs a mentor to be truly successful. Those who truly make a difference have had someone to guide them."
Dr. Foley, known for her work in pain management, directs the fellowship training program in palliative care at Cornell.
"Clearly, mentoring is an important part of encouraging people to come into a field," she said. "I've had extraordinary mentoring, people who thought what I did and what I could do was important."
