He’s Got SOUL
Third-year medical student Uche Ezeh co-founded a mentorship program that pairs attending physicians with minority students at the Miller School
By Bob Woods
Photograph by Tom Salyer
Third-year medical student Uche Ezeh co-founded a mentorship program that pairs attending physicians with minority students at the Miller School
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rowing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Uche Ezeh didn’t plan on following in his father’s footsteps as a physician. “I thought about becoming a teacher,” he said, a notion nurtured while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, where he mentored local high school students in between taking pre-med courses. “So I started thinking that I could take my interest in teaching and integrate it into a career of medicine.” Today Ezeh is indeed straddling both vocations, as a third-year medical student at the Miller School and co-founder of a mentorship program on campus that helps other minority medical students learn the ropes.
The program — called Seeking Opportunities, Unlocking Limits, or SOUL — is affiliated with the UM chapter of the Student National Medical Association, a nationwide, student-run organization that supports underrepresented minority medical students. Ezeh and classmate Brea Willey launched SOUL in January 2021, after Laura Martin, D.O., an assistant professor in the Department of Urology, contacted Ezeh with the idea of pairing physicians in her department with medical students of color. “Brea and I were already considering starting a mentorship program, so it was perfect timing,” he recalled.
Ezeh and Willey have now recruited more than 20 attending physicians, all faculty members, from various specialties, including internal medicine, anesthesiology, otolaryngology and neurological surgery. The mentors are matched with first- and second-year students, with whom they meet at least twice a semester to explore everything from applying for residency programs to suturing skills to data analytics. “We’re organizing a racial medicine panel, hosted by Dean Henri Ford, to bring attention to the educational experiences of Black attendings,” Ezeh said.
SOUL demonstrates the school’s efforts to promote diversity in medicine, he added. “The mentee’s early introduction to a mentor and a specialty they might be considering shows that the Miller School is invested in their careers. It also shows that there are many physicians among the faculty who are eager to increase diversity within their respective fields.”
As for himself, Ezeh sees SOUL as way to pay it forward. “For me, it’s about giving back to this school, which gives so much to us.” 
