Rebecca Wolinsky Named 2022 Pisacano Scholar

Rebecca Wolinsky, a fourth-year medical student, has been named a 2022 Pisacano Scholar.

One of 10 awardees selected by Board of Directors of the Pisacano Leadership Foundation, Inc., recipients 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 to each recipient, provides educational programs, leadership training and funding for fourth-year medical students identified as the future leaders in family medicine.

Originally from Houston, Wolinsky earned her BA from Brown University in Africana Studies and Community Health, 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, 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 post-baccalaureate premedical program and worked as a medical practice assistant in a gynecology clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center 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 co-founded Creating Leadership and Education to Address Racism, a now annual enrichment series featuring experts in the field, and co-founded the School’s Racism in Medicine Vertical Integration Group, which performed 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 student to testify. She is a member of the Gold Humanism Honor Society and the Shapiro Academic Honors Society for clinical professionalism and humanism.

Wolinsky is thrilled to pursue a career in full-spectrum family medicine that combines her commitments to community health, reproductive justice, and addressing racism in medicine. Read more about Wolinsky.

Since 1993, the PLF has selected 176 outstanding medical students.  Approximately 3,000 applicants representing close to 200 medical schools competed for these scholarships.