Rubor is indebted to all of the past medical students who have served as editors and dedicated their time and energy to this publication.
2022 | Volume 10
Sabina Imanbekova
2021 Editor-in-ChiefSabina was born and raised in the mountainous city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, until age 12, and has lived in Salt Lake City ever since. She is a non-traditional second-year medical student, class of 2022, at the University of Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah with a dual B.S. in Biology and Psychology and a minor in Chemistry. She also performed extracurricular research in neuropsychology and cardiovascular genetics, worked in the student government, and volunteered with populations experiencing homelessness and disability. After undergrad, she worked as a data analyst, snowboarded to her heart’s content, and became certified as a PADI Rescue SCUBA diver. She also studied abroad in Grenoble, France, before starting medical school.
Sabina is interested in pursuing radiology and exploring the wholeness of doctors as individuals within and outside of our profession. She believes that self-expression through creation, poetry, prose, and music is essential to looking, observing, feeling, and understanding who we are. The arts and humanities allow us to delve into what makes us human—unique and different—as well as what connects us to one another. She is honored and excited to serve on the Rubor team.
She enjoys reading and piano, dabbling in French and Spanish, and spending time with her daughter.
2021 | Volume 9
Serena Fang
MED '21Serena is a member of the UUSOM class of 2021 from Salt Lake City. She completed her undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy (one major!), and a minor in Text and Traditions. Outside of class, she spent her time teaching music lessons with a local non-profit and DJ-ing for the on-campus radio station. Before starting medical school, she spent a year in Arlington, Virginia working as a medical assistant and exploring museums and brunch spots in D.C. In her medical career, she hopes to cultivate and share her life-long interest in human behavior—why we feel the things that we feel and do the things that we do. She is drawn to both medicine and the arts for the way that each field supports and promotes the human experience.
2020 | Volume 8
Phoebe Draper
Phoebe is a Salt Lake City native and a third-year medical student in the class of 2021 at the University of Utah. Before medical school, she majored in oil painting at Brown University, and worked with a consulting group called Arts Practica to build relationships between medical schools and art museums. She studied painting abroad at The Sorbonne in Paris and worked in Washington D.C. as a researcher in global nursing practices. She plans to pursue a career in women’s health as an OB/GYN, with a focus on access to care in low-income areas in the U.S. and Latin America. She is honored and energized to be on the Rubor team because the magazine helps weave art and storytelling into the medical school experience. Medicine and art are, she believes, intimately intertwined. Both require close observation, navigation of uncertainty, and deliberate decision-making. Both illuminate what’s most important in our lives, and both can lead to healing.
2020 | Volume 8
Lillian Boettcher
Lily is a fourth-year M.D. candidate, class of 2020, at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Oklahoma. After graduating from Yale University with a B.A. in American Studies, with focuses in architecture, sculpture, and American history, and a senior thesis on the transcontinental railroad, she logically decided that she wanted to go to medical school and continued her pre-med coursework at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Before moving to Utah, she taught science and math for the American Indian Education Program of Norman, Oklahoma Public Schools and worked for the University of Oklahoma Department of Biology. Her clinical medical research includes projects with Departments of Neurosurgery at several institutions, among which are a few medical history papers. She advocates for the intersection of medicine and science with the arts and humanities, which implore us to write, create, empathize and think critically, especially vital in this particular setting that demands recognition and respect for diverse patients, people and experiences. She is grateful for the support of the University of Utah School of Medicine Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities and all those who support it; the Layers of Medicine course for medical students, led by Dr. Karly Pippitt and Dr. Gretchen Case, and Parallel Charts writing course, led by Dr. Susan Sample; and all of her previous art teachers.
She loves western American history, maps, and the National Parks.
2019 | Volume 7
Kajsa Vlasic, MD
2019 Editor-in-ChiefRESIDENCY:
St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, Pediatrics
Philadelphia, PA
MEDICAL SCHOOL:
University of Utah, 2019
Salt Lake City, UT
UNDERGRADUATE:
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT
Dr. Kajsa Vlasic’s first venture into the world of medical humanities and narrative medicine was through her Honors English undergraduate thesis at the University of Utah, partially funded by the Tanner Humanities Center, in which she used storytelling and the history of women writers to give voice to a group of female breast cancer survivors. During medical school she served as an Associate Editor of Rubor from 2015 to 2018 and took on the role of Editor-in-Chief during her fourth year of medical school. During her time as Editor-in-Chief she led the collaborative re-design process of Rubor’s website with Lily Boettcher (MED ’20) and the Eccles Health Sciences Library in hopes of creating a longstanding online repository for the medical arts and humanities projects produced at the University of Utah School of Medicine. In addition, she was a member of the inaugural Parallel Charts course offered by Dr. Susan Sample and helped publish the University of Utah School of Medicine’s first Gold Humanism Honor Society 55-word story collection, Voices from the Wards. She is particularly interested in the use of narrative medicine as a form of resiliency in medical training.
Kajsa is a current Pediatrics resident in the vibrant community of North Philadelphia at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. She is incredibly passionate about supporting maternal-newborn care and pediatric emergency care services in low-resource areas of the United States, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her current global health research efforts are in the remote Himalaya of Nepal and rural India and she dreams of one day returning more permanently to southern Africa, where she spent her earliest years. She misses her view of the Wasatch Front every day.
2018 | Volume 6
Madison Hunt, MD
2018 Editor-in-ChiefRESIDENCY:
New York University, Emergency Medicine
New York City, NY
MEDICAL SCHOOL:
University of Utah, 2018
Salt Lake City, UT
UNDERGRADUATE:
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
2017 | Volume 5
David Smyth, M.D.
2017 Editor-in-ChiefRESIDENCY:
Rush University Medical Center, Neurology
Chicago, IL
MEDICAL SCHOOL:
University of Utah, 2017
Salt Lake City, UT
UNDERGRADUATE:
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT
2016 | Volume 4
Martin de la Presa, MD
2016 Editor-in-ChiefRESIDENCY:
University of Minnesota, Ophthalmology
Minneapolis, MN
MEDICAL SCHOOL:
University of Utah, 2016
Salt Lake City, UT
UNDERGRADUATE:
Macalester College
Saint Paul, MN
2015 | Volume 3 and 2013 | Volume 1
Quinn Orb, MD
2015, 2013 Editor-in-Chief, 2012 Rubor Co-creatorDr. Orb created Rubor as a first-year medical student at the University of Utah in 2013. He served as Editor-in-Chief in 2013 and 2015. He is currently a fifth-year resident at the University of Utah in Otolaryngology and is incredibly grateful for the opportunity to attend both medical school and complete residency in such an amazing and unique place. He and his wife, Kate, as well as their 1-year-old daughter, Reese, love to take advantage of all that Salt Lake and the mountains of Utah have to offer. Prior to starting medical school, Quinn lived and worked in the Northeast after attending Dartmouth College for undergrad where he majored in Romance Languages (French and Spanish). This is where he developed his interest in literature and the humanities prior to beginning his path in medicine. Quinn is very grateful for all of the support from both the University of Utah School of Medicine as well as the Alumni Association in starting and continuing the tradition of Rubor.
RESIDENCY:
University of Utah, Otolaryngology
Salt Lake City, UT
MEDICAL SCHOOL:
University of Utah, 2015
Salt Lake City, UT
UNDERGRADUATE:
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH
2014 | Volume 2
Stephen Jenkins, MD
2014 Editor-in-ChiefDr. Jenkins served as Rubor Editor-in-Chief in 2014. He completed his residency training at the University of Utah in Internal Medicine and is now a hospitalist and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Utah. He completed his undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in biology. Stephen is married with two sons, and loves exploring the state of Utah with his family.
RESIDENCY:
University of Utah, Internal Medicine
Salt Lake City, UT
MEDICAL SCHOOL:
University of Utah 2014
Salt Lake City, UT
UNDERGRADUATE:
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT