Denise Jimenez-Tapia, a 2025 Pisacano Scholar, is a fourth-year dual-degree MD/MBA student in the PRIME-LA program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is the proud eldest daughter of immigrant farmworkers, born and raised in Lakeport, a small agricultural town in Northern California. Surrounded by fields of grapes and pears, Lakeport has long been a home for farmworkers, like her parents, whose labor sustains both the community and her family’s livelihood.

Denise’s time working alongside her dad as a cherry picker was the beginning of her harvest in medicine. Looking back on those early mornings and long days as an 8th grader, she realized the fields gave her more than just aching muscles and sunburnt skin – they gave her a sense of purpose. Working alongside her parents, Denise witnessed firsthand the urgent and unmet health needs of farmworkers, a realization that planted the seed for her future in medicine.

Denise’s commitment to becoming a physician is deeply rooted in the desire to advocate for farmworker health. Migrating with her parents nurtured the determination to serve as both an advocate and provider for families like hers. As a first-generation college student, Denise didn’t know exactly how she would get there, but knew she had to pursue higher education. That determination led her to earn a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology and Society from UCLA.

Health care is deeply intertwined with the interests of the medical industrial complex. To better navigate this system, Denise decided to pursue a master’s in business administration, gaining the business language of finance and management that will allow her to advocate for her community’s health and build the health care infrastructure that farmworking families urgently need. The MBA will allow Denise to strategically engage with medical boards, anticipate their financial and operational concerns, and develop solutions that prioritize community health.

Denise chose family medicine as her path because it uniquely integrates her passions for advocacy, health equity, and education across all ages and populations. Through this specialty, Denise can remain closely connected to the families and communities she seeks to serve. Her organization, La Cosecha – “The Harvest” – represents the beginning of the change she envisions within medicine. To date, they have trained over 400 farmworkers to recognize and prevent heat illness, a leading cause of preventable deaths in the fields, and educated nearly 100 farmworkers on pesticide safety. They have organized a college fair in Oxnard to promote higher education among farmworker families and provided school supplies to 400 children of farmworkers. Just as importantly, they have engaged future health care providers in understanding and addressing the occupational hazards that impact farmworkers’ lives.

This is the work Denise will continue as a physician: training, equipping, and advocating so that the health of farmworkers—and the well-being of communities like her own—are no longer overlooked but placed at the center of care.