Dr. Stephanie Mokashi

When she was growing up, Dr. Stephanie Mokashi often visited her grandparents in India. Her grandfather regularly worked on community service projects and, while accompanying him, Dr. Mokashi witnessed intense poverty at some of the neediest orphanages in India. These experiences compelled her to give back to her home community.

“Some of my fondest childhood memories involve those travels to India,” she said. “But when we would come back home, my parents continued to instill their value of hard work into me.”

For Dr. Mokashi, home is Texas. She was raised in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and attended Flower Mound High School. There, she balanced school, a part-time job, and drill team.

But college would prove an even more intense exercise in balancing activities. She attended UT Austin’s College of Natural Sciences, where she was involved with the Freshman Research Initiative, the nation’s largest undergraduate research program, working in a basic science laboratory studying evolution. Later, she became an undergraduate teaching assistant for a research methods course, teaching students the principles of research and guiding them with their research proposals.

For Dr. Mokashi, that was only the beginning. At UT Southwestern, she worked as a manager at the student-run Monday Clinic, which provides health care to underserved and uninsured communities in Dallas. There, she expanded resources available at the clinic to include mental health screenings and led quality improvement projects, including a hand hygiene initiative.

“While working as a manager, I further realized my passion for helping those who are underserved,” Dr. Mokashi said. “Many of the patients at this clinic had co-occurring mental illness that was not treated or undertreated. I realized the dire need to increase access to mental health resources.”

Thanks to her dedication to serving those in need and specifically ensuring their mental health needs are met, Dr. Mokashi, who graduates with a combined Doctor of Medicine/Master of Public Health degree, has been awarded both the North Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians Award for Outstanding Medical Student in Psychiatry and the United States Public Health Service 2018 Excellence in Public Health Award.

“Stephanie’s academic achievements speak for themselves, but it’s only in working with her directly that we’ve all come to admire her depth of heart and compassion,” said Dr. Adam Brenner, Professor of Psychiatry. “Equally impressive is how Stephanie integrates her own experiences with courageous self-reflection and a truly incisive intellect.”

Dr. Mokashi pursued a Master of Public Health degree to learn more about the intricacies of the health care system and to better understand health disparities. She worked with the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI) on a project that aims to better connect community-based organizations, such as homeless shelters and food pantries, with health care providers such as the Parkland Health & Hospital System.

“Many people with severe mental illness need improved access to social services, and while working with PCCI I realized my passion for advocating for these patients,” she said. “These experiences, along with my psychiatry clinical rotations, cemented my decision to pursue psychiatry.”

A personal connection also influenced Dr. Mokashi to pursue a career in psychiatry – a close family member who has suffered from severe mental illness.

“Seeing the pain and suffering this individual endured motivated me to continue this path,” Dr. Mokashi said. “By having a window into this individual’s struggle, I recognized I have developed patience, openness, and acceptance of people with mental illness.”

Among Dr. Mokashi’s other affiliations: the Gold Humanism Honor Society, where she organized and presented at an event for medical students transitioning to clinical years and led the mission statement event for first-year medical students; the Women’s Health Enrichment Elective, where she created a preclinical elective to prepare physicians-in-training for health issues related to women such as domestic/sexual violence, reproductive health, mental health, and transgender health; and the Medical Student Training in Aging Research program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she conducted geriatric clinical research funded by the National Institute on Aging, analyzing the relationship between grip strength and self-rated quality of life.

Dr. Mokashi will be a psychiatry resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

“I am beyond excited to start my career as a psychiatrist,” she said. “I hope to be a psychiatry provider in the public sector and develop programs that better connect people with severe mental illness to social services in the community.”