Top Teacher

“Leading this course was the experience of a lifetime,” she wrote. “It allowed me to contribute immensely as an educator and to truly see students evolve from being disappointed and afraid after their clinical education was disrupted to developing and leading impactful community service projects that made an immediate difference in the life of New Mexicans experiencing the pandemic.”

Later, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, Rohan-Minjares and her teaching partner, Jessica Goodkind, PhD, responded to the growing wave of protests by beefing up their anti-racism curriculum to guide new discussions on racism in medical education and taking on leadership of the School of Medicine’s Anti-Racism Curriculum Task Force. The pair were also invited to present their curriculum at the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center at El Paso.

Rohan-Minjares grew up in Gallup, a railroad town in western New Mexico bordering on the Navajo Nation. Her mother’s family had lived there for several generations, while her father came to the area as a teenager from the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

She was valedictorian of her graduating class at Gallup High School in 1996 and attended Notre Dame University, where she majored in both premed and government. She completed medical school at Stanford University before returning to New Mexico for her family medicine residency – where she discovered a passion for teaching.

“It’s the reason I stayed on at UNM after my residency,” she said. “I saw the impact I could have on generations of doctors.”

When Rohan-Minjares joined the School of Medicine faculty in 2008, McGrew, then chair of Family & Community Medicine, recruited her to develop a culturally effective care curriculum for medical students. She sees patients and teaches students and residents at the UNM North Valley Clinic.

“I am grateful for my experience in teaching and curriculum design and implementation over the years at the medical school,” she said in her statement. “I have heavily had to rely on these skills during the pandemic to adapt my own teaching and help other educators as we all did our best to continue to move medical students along on their educational journey.”