PHILADELPHIA — Nicholas Kenji Taylor, a fourth year medical student at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named a 2014 Pisacano Scholar by the Pisacano Leadership Foundation, Inc., of the American Board of Family Medicine.
Taylor is one of seven scholars selected as a Pisacano Scholar, and the fourth Penn Medicine medical student to be named since the start of the program in 1993. The last PSOM medical student to win the award was in 1996. The scholarships, valued up to $28,000 each, are awarded to students attending U.S. medical schools who demonstrate a strong commitment to the specialty of Family Medicine.
Taylor graduated from Brown University, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, earning undergraduate degrees in East Asian Studies and Neuroscience, and also completed a Masters in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship Engineering at Brown. At Brown as a Bill & Melinda Gates Millennium Scholar, Kenji was involved in community service learning, including founding an SAT prep program for low-income youth in Providence, Rhode Island—which is still running today. After college, Kenji worked in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo through a managerial training program with The Capital Group Companies. It was his volunteer work with the board of a federally-qualified health center in LA that convinced him social justice via medicine was the path for him.
Since his arrival at Penn, Taylor was named one of ten Gamble Scholars, Penn’s highest merit award. In his first year of medical school, Kenji managed The Cut Hypertension Program in which medical students visit African American barbershops to perform blood pressure screenings and educate customers about the silent dangers of hypertension—the program was featured in a Philadelphia Inquirer front page article. He has continued throughout medical school to build the program via an Albert Schweitzer Fellowship and United Health Foundation award.
Also at Penn, Kenji had the opportunity to work with Wharton researchers, management consultants and mothers2mothers in South Africa to build a system that tracked mothers infected with HIV through the process of preventing HIV transmission to their infants. This past year, through The CDCD Experience Applied Epidemiology Fellowship, Kenji spent 14 months away from medical school working on global pediatric HIV care and treatment research, outbreak investigations and health policy in Namibia, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Kenya.
Kenji envisions his future in family medicine as the privilege to provide one-on-one primary care to individuals in his local community, as well as strengthen systems of health and preventative services to the most vulnerable populations around the world.
The Pisacano Leadership Foundation, Inc. was created in 1990 by the American Board of Family Medicine in tribute to the founder and first Executive Director of the ABFM, Nicholas J. Pisacano, M.D. (1924-1990). Approximately 2,300 applicants representing more than 140 medical schools competed for these scholarships.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $580 million awarded in the 2023 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts,” Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries that have shaped modern medicine, including CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the Nobel Prize-winning mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System cares for patients in facilities and their homes stretching from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. UPHS facilities include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, chartered in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Penn Medicine at Home, GSPP Rehabilitation, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.9 billion enterprise powered by nearly 49,000 talented faculty and staff.