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Medical Humanities and Arts Program (MHAP) - “mapping our engagement with medicine and life.”
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MHAP 2023 Symposium
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MHAP has been busy over the past six months, launching the 2023 issue of Plexus, launching new courses, receiving awards, presenting at professional meetings, publications, and more.
To celebrate the return of Plexus in print form and the Medical Student Art Exhibit, we hosted the Medical Humanities & Arts Symposium in May. This event featured poets and artists who were published in the 2023 “Identity” issue of Plexus and medical student artists who submitted their creative work for the Art Exhibit. The symposium organizers, Celina Yang (GR2), Kenneth Schmitt (MS4), Ashley Hope (MS4), Jennifer Tan (MS2), and Olamide Sonuga (MS3) created an atmosphere where artists and audience
could interact, share their creativity and experiences. This will be an annual event, and we hope you will join us in 2024 when we celebrate the 25th publication of Plexus.
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Director, MHAP Juliet McMullin,
School of the Arts Dean Tiffany Ana Lopez,
and School of Medicine Dean Michael Stamos
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With the generous support of Dean Stamos, MHAP, hosted an SOM Night at the New Swan. It was an evening full of amusement and laughter as we learned about all of Shakespeare’s works, including jokes written specifically for SOM. The theater was full of SOM faculty, staff, students, and residents as Professor Eli Simon and the New Swan cast treated us to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) (revised) (redone). This is another event we look forward to hosting annually.
Medical students, workshop leaders, and artists from the “Art of Diagnosis”
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MHAP received an “Art of Diagnosis” award from the AAMC, Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Our proposal, Examining the Intersection of Implicit Bias and Medical Diagnosis was led by MSTP Celina Yang (GR2) and named as an AAMC student scholar. Celina and Cliff Danza (MS2) organized the “Art of Diagnosis” event which was held on September 14. The event featured medical student-created art and arts-focused workshops that deepened our understanding of implicit bias and diagnostic error. Congratulations, Celina and all of the UCI student and faculty presenters, and Leonora Naser-Saravia, for her administrative and artistic collaboration.
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Celina Yang and Dr. McMullin also presented UCI’s project as a poster and an oral presentation at the Cleveland SIDM conference in October.

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The American Society for Bioethics & Humanities (ASBH) also had a UCI MHAP representation featuring an analysis of Plexus. The presentation focused on the role of compassion in poetry and short stories in the last five years of our 24-year medical student-run arts and humanities journal. Celina Yang (GR2) and Ashley Hope (MS4), presented the findings and generated a terrific conversation about medical student-run journals. October was busy with the back-to-back SDIM conference in Cleveland and ASBH in Baltimore.
Check out Dr. Tan Nguyen most recent publication Arts and Poetry in the Clinic: A Novel Approach to Enhancing Patient Care and Job Satisfaction. Ann Fam Med. 2023 May-Jun;21(3):2845. This article provides important advice for bringing art into the clinic. It is exciting to see the continued emphasis on the whole person in their social context as a priority for medical training and practice.
To end where we began, with the launch of the 24th issue of Plexus, we want to welcome our 2023-24 editorial team, who will oversee the 25th-anniversary issue. We have an enormous amount of gratitude for this team; Editor-in-Chief Chris Sahagian (MS4), the Creative Review Team includes Caroline Gee (MS1) Sana Shah (MS1) and Huan Nguyen (MS2), our Design Team includes Nicole Parker (MS1) and Britney Weng (MS1). We look forward to collaborating with the team, hosting the 2024 symposium, and sharing the creative work of SOM faculty, residents, students, and staff.
If you’d like more information about MHAP please contact Juliet McMullin, PhD (mcmullij@hs.uci.edu) or Dr. Tan Nguyen, MD. (tanqn@hs.uci.edu) Or visit our new website (which is still in progress).

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