Oyate Diversity Student Council
supports campus diversity
The Oyate Diversity Student Council recently celebrated its 4th annual graduation
banquet for all graduating minority and underrepresented seniors from the
Health Sciences Center campus. This year’s banquet was a great success
as the student group wished a successful farewell to the seniors who attended
the banquet.
This year’s graduates:
School of Medicine -- Lina Aguirre, Patrick Diaz, Oswaldo Grenardo, Elishia
Oliva and Margarita Saenz
School of Nursing -- Tara Chavis, Freda Lamiorkor Lamptey, Kay Min and Angela
Zah
School of Pharmacy -- Mercy Desouza, Lien Thuy Hansman and Josh Oliva
DongMei Pan with a Masters in Biostatistics
 |
| Graduating seniors honored at the 4th annual Oyate Diversity Student Council banquet. |
Oyate (Oy-a-tey), which signifies “family” in the Lakota language
(Sioux Indians), was founded in 2001 by Anthony Oliva a UCD MD/PhD student.
In 2001, Anthony saw that the number of minority students on campus was low
and that the minority students from the various schools rarely interacted
with students outside of their own professional school.
Anthony thought that
these two things combined to create a culture of isolation for many minority
students, so he took this vision and created Oyate with help from Linda Yardley,
a staff member from the Office of Diversity, who is now retired.
Oyate acts to serve two main goals:
• To develop a sense of community on the campus between students from all
professional schools.
• To actively mentor college and high school students interested in a health
care profession.
Since its founding year, Oyate has not only been instrumental in providing
a sense of family and unity for the Health Sciences Center students but has
extended its efforts into the community by working with the Denver public
high schools as well.
Several years ago, Anthony Oliva and Elishia Oliva saw the necessity to increase
the number of underrepresented minority individuals in the health care professions.
With this goal in mind and in working with other student members of Oyate
and the Denver Public Schools, Anthony and Elishia created Hands on Medical
Education through Science (HOMES). The students involved with Oyate have
been dedicated to conducting workshops at the high schools every month and
providing pizza lunches for the high school kids as well.
Oyate believes so strongly in the mission to increase diversity in the health
care professions that they began HOMES using their own money, raised by fundraising
efforts, to pay for the workshops. Some of the workshops last year have included
a cardiovascular workshop, a dental plaque lab, an eyeball dissection, a
head trauma discussion, and education on substance use. Over the last 2 1⁄2
years since the establishment of HOMES, Oyate has been able to reach out,
engage and mentor more than 500 minority and underrepresented high school
students.
The group has been fortunate to have the support of their faculty advisor
Sonia Flores, PhD; Ron Gallegos, the President’s Diversity Fund; Dominic
Martinez and Yessica Holguin, Office of Diversity; Michelyn Lintz and Boris
Tabakoff, PhD, Department of Pharmacology; Cheryl Gibson, among others.
Oyate hopes to continue to have this support and gain more support and recognition
from faculty and staff at the Health Sciences Center since there is no other
student group on campus like it whose membership is made up of students across
all schools at the HSC campus and who has a vested interest in increasing
diversity in the health care professions.
Outgoing student leadership includes Jeanette Brown, an MD/PhD student and
the current Oyate president, Genaro Fernandez, an MD student and vice president,
Tara Chavis a graduating nursing student and secretary, Joy Osuala, a PharmD
student and treasurer, and Devi Siregar and Kenneth Reed, both MD students
who helped coordinate the group’s many unifying social activities and
meetings.
New student leadership includes Jeanette Brown, Andrea Suarez, an MD student
and incoming president-elect, Reginald Gaylord, an MD student and incoming
vice president, and Henna Patel, a PharmD student and incoming treasurer.
The group also has an active past-group of student leaders including Darius
Walker, a PhD student, Elishia Oliva who finishes her MD this spring, Anthony
Oliva an MD/PhD student, Andre Gillespie, a DDS student, Alex Griego, a DDS
student, Shakib Hassan an MD student, Oswaldo Grenardo who is finishing his
MD this spring, and Louis Bush a new graduate of the School of Dentistry.
For more information about Oyate, please contact either Jeanette Brown at
jeanette.brown@uchsc.edu or Anthony Oliva at anthony.oliva@uchsc.edu.
If
you would like in any way to support Oyate in its efforts for diversity both
at the Health Sciences Center and in the community high schools, please contact
Anthony Oliva at anthony.oliva@uchsc.edu.
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