Molly Cooke, M.D. FACP, Professor of Medicine, is the inaugural Director of Education for Global Health Sciences across the five schools at UCSF (Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, and the Graduate Division). Appointed in July 2012, her charge is to develop a portfolio of high impact educational programs for UCSF students, residents, fellows, post-docs, and faculty members and to devise innovative and high-value ways to share UCSF’s expertise in discovery science, health care delivery, professional education, and basic science with international partners.

Dr. Cooke has been active in medical education program development and educational research throughout her career. A distinguished teacher, Dr. Cooke has twice received the Kaiser Family Foundation Teaching Award as well as a UCSF Academic Senate Award for Distinction in Teaching. In 2006, she was awarded the AOA/Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC); in 2010, she received the Career Achievement Award in Education from the Society for General Internal Medicine. As a Senior Scholar of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, she co-directed a national study of medical education. This work culminated in the text, Educating Physicians: A Call for Reform of Medical School and Residency, by Molly Cooke, David M. Irby and Bridget C. O’Brien, published in June 2010 by Jossey-Bass/Wiley.

Dr. Cooke has worked on using education and faculty development to address the health problems of under-served populations. A founding faculty member of the internal medicine residency at San Francisco General Hospital–UCSF, she developed GME curricula focused on the care of the urban under-served, including community health and advocacy. She was the School of Medicine’s liaison to UCSF’s regional campus in Fresno from 2008 to 2013 and, in that capacity and as a member of the San Joaquin Valley PRIME advisory board, addressed health inequities in California’s Central Valley. She provided the educational expertise for IDCAP, Infectious Disease Capacity Building Evaluation, a three-year project exploring cost-effective ways to build capacity among mid-level providers in sub-Saharan Africa funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She serves on the Training Advisory Committee of he University of Zimbabwe Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI); the US partner institutions are the University of Colorado and Stanford University.

Dr. Cooke is a practicing internist with a special interest in HIV and other complex chronic illnesses. She has advised the AMA, the American College of Physicians (ACP), and the AAMC on clinical care and ethical and policy issues in the HIV epidemic, and was a founding co-director of the AIDS Task Force of the Society for General Internal Medicine. She testified before both National Commissions on AIDS (1988 and 1990). She was a Department of Health and Human Services Primary Care Health Policy Fellow in 2004 and has been repeatedly selected by her peers as one of “America’s Best Doctors.” She is Past President (2013-14) of the American College of Physicians (ACP), the nation’s largest medical specialty organization. She also served as Governor of the Northern California chapter of the ACP from 2004 to 2009.

Dr. Cooke is a graduate of Stanford University. She received her medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine. She did her residency training at the University of California, San Francisco, where she also served as chief resident in medicine and did a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Fellowship focusing on ethics. She was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2013.