"While there is a very sad dimension to every death, I don't find it depleting or exhausting. The people at the end of HIV typically don't expect you to save their lives. That would be exhausting. But most of the time I can do much of what the patient and the family need me to be able to do."

Physician, mother, professor, mentor: Molly Cooke attempts to fulfill all of these roles on a daily basis and must be ready to change hats at any given moment. Growing up, there were no physicians in her immediate family but Dr. Cooke was interested in science and liked working with people. Medicine offered her a combination of the two. In 1977, she received her medical degree from Stanford University where she felt "supported and encouraged by the men in my class who were excited to be part of a social transformation in medicine."

Cooke went on to complete her residency at the University California at San Francisco, where she now teaches and works with first and second year medical students. Currently, half of her clinical practice is working with people with HIV/AIDS. As early as 1981, at the start of the epidemic, Dr. Cooke was based at San Francisco General Hospital where she began to see patients suffering from the disease. "AIDS was fascinating to me in all its dimensions, from the pathogenesis, the cause, to the psychological effects on physicians who cared for people with the disease. On a personal level, I find it, paradoxically, renewing and grounding to be a witness at times when my patients and their families are dealing with several of life's most important moments." She served as Chair of the Board of Project Open Hand from 1995 through 1996.

In 1996, Dr. Cooke was the recipient of UCSF's Chancellor's Award for the Advancement of Women. She headed a team that researched a comparative study of men and women throughout the UCSF campus. She and her team found salary, hiring and appointment inequities between the school's male and female employees. The study helped to right some of the systemic imbalance between the genders.

Dr. Cooke is acutely aware of the difficulties that the first years of medical school present to women. The competitive environment, that can strain residents to the breaking point, goes against the collaborative model that women naturally gravitate toward. As a mother of three, Cooke can speak from the experience of balancing a career with parenthood, as well as persevering and thriving in the interdisciplinary worlds of medicine: research, teaching, and the practice of compassion.

For more about Dr. Cooke and her research, go to the University of California at San Francisco Web Site at http://www.ucsf.edu.