UC Merced Magazine | Volume XVIII, Issue IV

Profiles in Giving Back Many UC Merced graduates have gone on to careers in health care. Here are two who didn’t just enter the medical field but chose to give back by practicing in the San Joaquin Valley.

By Jody Murray

Dr. Zi Wang (’11) Neurologist, Memorial Medical Center, Modesto Background: Wang was born in China and immigrated to the United States at age 3. His grade school years started in San Francisco and continued in Castro Valley, where he graduated from Castro Valley High.

Dr. Maricela Rangel-Garcia (’09) Gastroenterologist and hepatologist, UCSF Fresno Background: Born in Selma and raised in Clovis, Rangel-Garcia is a third-generation Mexican

American. She has been a folklorico dancer since age 3. When she was a child, Rangel-Garcia’s primary care physician was Dr. Katherine Flores, now director of UCSF Fresno’s Latino Center for Medical Education. Both of her parents work in the mental health field. Being a Bobcat: In the early ’00s, when Rangel-Garcia was in high school, her father drove her to the UC Merced construction site. “There was nothing out there,” she said. “Some foundations, but no buildings.” Dad made a strong pitch — it’s close to home but not too close, and it’s going to be an outstanding university, he said. She agreed. She enrolled at UC Merced figuring she would go into law, but an introduction to biology class turned her head. She was inspired by Professor Maria Pallavicini, the founding dean of the School of Natural Sciences who today is the provost at University of the Pacific. Rangel-Garcia changed her major to human biology. “From that point on, I never veered off the doctor pathway.” She joined the national Latino Medical Student Association and went to its pre-med conferences, accumulating knowledge and motivation. Medical education: Rangel-Garcia entered the San Joaquin Valley PRIME program and spent four years at UC Davis and UCSF Fresno. She completed her residency at UC Davis, followed by a gastroenterology fellowship at UC Irvine. Career: Rangel-Garcia works for the Central California Faculty Medical Group, which is affiliated with UCSF Fresno. Her duties include seeing patients from underserved communities who may have waited up to a year to see a gastrointestinal (GI) specialist. Rangel-Garcia also practices hepatology, which focuses on the liver, gall bladder and pancreas. “A big thing for me is the prevention of colon cancer,” she said. “It’s becoming more prevalent in the younger generation and it’s preventable.” She also has a private clinic and is on call for hospital cases. Quotable: “UC Merced was small, but you could create your own pathway. It pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me think outside the box. We all took a risk on UC Merced, and it paid off.”

Being a Bobcat: He enrolled at UC Merced in 2007, two years after the campus started offering undergraduate classes. He was a psychology major and a career in health care seemed possible but hardly definite. Then, in that first year, he took a job as a medical scribe at Memorial Medical Center in Modesto. He worked there for four years, lapping up knowledge and experiencing the living-preserving energy of an emergency room. How did he juggle classwork working two or three days a week at a job an hour from campus? “Basically,” he said, “I had no social life.” One of his UC Merced mentors, Professor Anna Song, taught a class on health disparities – something he witnessed at Memorial. “I saw a community very challenged with health access, primary doctors and specialists,” said Wang, who also served as a research assistant in Song’s lab. “I told myself I need come back after medical training and serve this community.” Medical education: Wang attended medical school at Temple University and did his residency – and the bulk of his training in neurology – at Yale University. He completed a fellowship in stroke vascular neurology at UCSF. Career: Wang performs most of his work at Modesto’s Memorial Medical Center. He is, by training, a vascular neurologist, focusing on blood-flow issues that involve the central nervous system, including stroke and brain hemorrhages. His attraction to neurology sounds much like why he chose UC Merced. “The brain remains the new frontier,” he said. “We’re at the very edge of developing new therapies, procedures and surgeries to care for patients with neurological disorders.” Quotable: “I’m someone who is attracted to the novel, to something that has big potential but is not quite there yet. UC Merced was that – a new campus in its infancy, but you could see a lot of big changes were going to happen. I was attracted to that.”

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