Alejandra Jauregui: 2020 SPIRIT of DOM Award Recipient

Congratulations to Alejandra Jauregui for winning the 2020 SPIRIT of DOM Award, COVID Edition! This award is to recognize staff members who have made significant contributions to the missions of the Department of Medicine, directly or indirectly related to the pandemic. 

Alejandra Jauregui is a Clinical Research Coordinator in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy, and Sleep Medicine at UCSF Health and has been with us since 2015. She was nominated by many faculty, nursing care, and staff colleagues for her unparalleled divisional efforts to respond to the COVID crisis.

“Just a few days after everything shut down in mid-March, my group was asked to lead UCSF’s team for an NIAID-directed project to build an entirely new cohort study focused on hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Alejandra was made responsible for the implementation of an entirely new cohort (the COVID-19 Multi-phenotyping for Effective Therapies Cohort, COMET) at three sites with outstanding efficiency and in record time.  Thanks in large part to Alejandra’s efforts as the lead CRC, UCSF’s site was the first in the 10-site NIAID Consortium to start enrolling patients, only three weeks after we were first asked to participate.  She worked seven days a week, many days 12 hours or more, to get the COMET study up and running, and to get precious biosamples to our laboratory-based research partners so they could work around the clock to understand the biology of COVID-19. She led a team of five CRCs across three sites, including training four new hires and numerous volunteers during this period.  As a native Spanish speaker and member of the Latina community, Alejandra felt an intense personal commitment to making sure that members of the LatinX community were represented in COVID-19 research studies and treated with the greatest respect. Thanks to her exceptional leadership and dedication, our site was the first in the NIAID Consortium to complete our target enrollment of 100 patients. Alejandra has become a leader in the NIAID multisite network; other sites now often turn to her to help them troubleshoot their barriers to enrollment. When local enrollment was completed for the NIAID-funded COMET study, however, Alejandra still had more to give.  She approached me and asked if she could add to her duties by taking on a new role as the lead CRC for one of our interventional clinical trials, the ISPY COVID trial.  ISPY COVID is a Phase 2 adaptive platform trial of novel therapeutics for patients with severe COVID-19. She has quickly established herself as one of the leading CRC’s in this multisite network across the United States, with her attention to detail, careful approach to screening and enrollment, and dedication to the study goals.” 

Please join us for a virtual awarding ceremony on Friday, 1/22, at 12:30 pm. Refer to the email from Bob Wachter titled "Announcing the SPIRIT of DOM Award Winners - COVID Edition" for the Zoom meeting link. 

Below are all the recipients of the SPIRIT of DOM Award (in alphabetical order, left to right):

  • Brooksley Bigart, Administrative Officer & Executive Analyst, Central Administration at ZSFG 
  • Douglas Black, Clinical Research Analyst, Division of HIV, ID, and Global Medicine at ZSFG 
  • Michelle Cai, Quality Improvement Analyst, Division of Hospital Medicine at UCSF Health 
  • Gato Gourley, Division Manager, Center for Vulnerable Populations at ZSFG 
  • Alejandra Jauregui, Clinical Research Coordinator, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Allergy Medicine at UCSF Health 
  • Emily Yeung, Administrative Officer, Division of General Internal Medicine at UCSF Health 

More information on all recipients of the award can be found on the SPIRIT of DOM webpage.