Jenna Norton, a 2026 Pisacano Scholar, is a fourth-year medical student at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine (UNM). Jenna’s path to medicine was anything but direct. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in theatre arts in 2010, intending to pursue classic theatre and costume design, until her father passed away suddenly during college. Jenna finished college while working late nights as a bartender and at the family hardware store on weekends, an experience that redirected her toward a career in service.

Jenna went on to earn a graduate degree in social work from the University of Houston and spent a decade as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in street medicine and community behavioral health, work that eventually convinced her she belonged in medicine after all. Mentors at Allegheny General Hospital (Drs. Cuevas, Perri, and Miller), along with street medicine pioneer Dr. Jim Withers, showed her that physicians could hold the same commitments to justice and humanism as she had built her first career around.

That conviction has shaped her medical training and her future in family medicine. Jenna co-founded UNM’s Street Medicine, Addiction, and Harm Reduction Team (SMAHRT), which runs overdose response and prevention trainings, participates in the city’s Point in Time Count, and assists in facilitating the annual Unhoused Persons’ Memorial Vigil. She and her co-founder also helped design UNM’s first fourth-year street medicine elective, which launched in 2025.

Jenna’s scholarship follows the same throughline. As student principal investigator of “The Uncounted Dead,” a six-year retrospective study conducted with the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator, her team analyzed over 32,000 cases and found that unhoused New Mexicans lose an average of 23 to 30 years of life compared to their housed counterparts. The work has earned her the Jelinek Excellence in Research Scholarship, a tenure as Academic Research and Curriculum Chair for the Street Medicine Institute Student Coalition, and selection to present at both the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) FUTURE conference and the American Medical Association (AMA) Research Challenge.

Outside the clinic, Jenna is a mountaineer and trail runner who has summited peaks across the globe and led a team up Mt. Rainier during medical school. She is also a banjo player and published writer whose poetry has appeared in the City of Albuquerque Poetry Anthology. Her proudest achievement, however, is her new daughter, Louise, as motherhood has only deepened her advocacy for medical trainees who are also parents.

Jenna is pursuing a residency in Family Medicine, supported by her incredibly patient spouse Luke, and drawn to a specialty built on advocacy and relationships with patients too often overlooked by the health care system. She is grateful to the Pisacano Leadership Foundation for her selection and to her mentors at the UNM School of Medicine including Drs. Smoker, Belmonte, Bissell, Doorley, and Fleg.