Caroline N. Harada, MD
University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine
Improving equity in health care is a humanistic pursuit and a pressing concern for many practitioners and educators. This important issue has long been a focal point for Caroline Harada, MD, associate dean for strategic initiatives and director of Project Advancing Health Equity through Alabama’s Doctors (AHEAD), the longitudinal health equity curriculum at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine (UAB Heersink SOM).
A geriatrician by training, Dr. Harada served as the school’s geriatrics fellowship director before transitioning in 2015 to undergraduate medical education to serve as assistant dean for Community-Engaged Scholarship. In that role, she was responsible for reinventing and rebuilding the school’s Learning Communities program, which aims to develop students’ professional identities. Under her leadership, the program grew to include 11 faculty members and 70-80 house staff mentors, who teach 38 unique learning sessions for students throughout the four years of medical school, becoming one of the defining experiences for medical students at UAB Heersink SOM.
Dr. Harada also founded and directs the school’s office of service learning, which provides curricular and extracurricular service-learning experiences for medical students. She has grown that program from a single, service-learning activity to 11 unique opportunities embedded within the curriculum, and she oversees 17 student-led service organizations and a student-run free clinic. All students enrolled at UAB Heersink SOM participate in service learning.
In 2015, Dr. Harada helped found the Alabama chapter of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation, which offers fellowships to graduate students in Alabama, to complete mentored projects to improve health in their communities. A year later, she founded the Health Equity Scholar Program for medical students planning to address health equity in their practice.
In 2019, Dr. Harada became director of Patient, Doctor, and Society, the first, foundational course that medical students take at UAB Heersink SOM. Under Dr. Harada’s directorship, this course has gone from being the worst-rated preclinical course to one of the highest rated. She has earned four “best educator” awards for her teaching in that course.
More recently, under her oversight of Project AHEAD, Dr. Harada has developed new curricular content for eight preclinical courses, a lunch-and-learn lecture series, and a new health equity grand rounds series for students.
In 2018, Dr. Harada received the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation and the UAB Provost’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Service Learning in 2020.
Dr. Harada earned a BS in biology from Brown University and an MD from Yale School of Medicine. She also completed an internal medicine residency and a geriatrics fellowship at the University of Chicago.