Meet the Team
Jane Gagliardi, MD
Jane Gagliardi is an internist-psychiatrist who trained at Duke. During her residency, she gained a lot of benefit from her time working at the Duke Outpatient Clinic (DOC) from 2001 through 2003, including time as the DOC/DRH assistant chief resident for three months in 2003. She has long held the view that the most important assets physicians and other healthcare providers bring to their work is their humanity and critical thinking skills. Dr. Gagliardi served for three years as Dr. Lee's residency training director and had the privilege of witnessing the expansion of his knowledge, curiosity, humanity, humility and passion over time to include recognizing the impotance of advocating for patients' individual, unique and personal stories. As the senior project mentor, Dr. Gagliardi has learned from the sensitive and compassionate interprofessional team who support patients and maintain their own wellbeing by recognizing humanity among their patients and themselves. Serving since 2023 as the Associate Dean for the Learning Environment and Well-Being at Duke University School of Medicine, Dr Gagliardi hopes to be able to bring the sacred stories of Stories Project participants to a wide audience of early clinical learners and is grateful for the opportunity to participate.
Katherine Henderson, M. Div, BCC
Katherine believes that human stories are the sacred text of our lives, and that we have much to learn from each other. She is passionate about inter-disciplinary healthcare and education, with a particular focus in expanding professional spiritual care beyond the hospital walls. As Chaplain at the Duke Outpatient Clinic, Katherine integrates her training and commitments in trauma-informed care, bereavement support, palliative care and social justice. She finds great meaning and delight in her work with both patients and staff, and is honored to receive their stories. Outside of work, Katherine enjoys hiking, books, tea, travel and stargazing.
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Jeffrey Lee, MD
Jeffrey Lee is a fifth-year internal medicine-psychiatry resident at Duke. He has an interest in using photography to reflect on how medical professionals can authentically engage with and develop empathy for their patients, especially those from different backgrounds. During medical school, he developed an autoethnography project that investigated the concept of the “other” by photographing, writing, and interviewing people from the Spanish culture and those living with dementia. The Stories Project was started as a passion project to highlight the complex and beautiful stories of the humans that seek care at the Duke Outpatient Clinic. In addition, he hopes the art and storytelling within this project will humanize patients, combat healthcare provider burnout, highlight the structural healthcare barriers patients must navigate, and promote interdisciplinary collaboration. Ultimately, he hopes this project will cultivate conversations that will transform and revitalize patient-centered care. After residency, he plans to spend part of his time traveling the world with his camera, photographing people from different cultures. He hopes these encounters will teach him truths about the human condition that can be translated to healthcare, restoring meaning into the practice of medicine. To see more of his photography, you can visit his website at https://jeffrey-lee.wixsite.com/portfolio
John David Ike, MD, MSc
John David (JD) Ike is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hospital Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine and a Faculty Associate in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, & History of Medicine. He earned a B.A. in Art History from Davidson College, an M.D. from Emory University, and a Master of Science in Health and Healthcare Research from the University of Michigan. He completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Duke University Health System (2017-2020) and he is an alumnus of the National Clinician Scholars Program at the University of Michigan (2020-2022). He is also a graduate of the Harvard Macy Institute’s Art Museum-based Health Professions Education Fellowship (2021-2022) where he now serves as a Faculty Coach sharing his expertise in museum-based teaching methodologies. In his role as a Faculty Associate in the Trent Center, Dr. Ike serves as the director of the second-year medical student (MS2) medical humanities curriculum for the Armstrong Scholars Program. He also serves as the co-director of the Duke Health System Internal Medicine Residency Program Art Museum-based curriculum for PGY1-PGY3 residents. Clinically, Dr. Ike works as a hospital medicine physician (hospitalists) at Duke University Hospital where he treats patients with acute medical needs. More information about Dr. Ike’s research and teaching can be found on Scholars @ Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/person/johndavidike
Elissa Nickolopoulous, MSW, LCSW
Elissa Rumer Nickolopoulos is a licensed clinical social worker at the Duke Outpatient Clinic (DOC) and very proud Durham native. She has a passion for holistic patient care and viewing the patient not as a conglomeration of symptoms or diagnoses, but rather, as the culmination of their life’s worth of stories and experiences. Elissa landed at the DOC in 2017 in her second year of graduate school, immediately knowing that she had found her place and her people, and never left. Elissa enjoys getting to teach and work alongside the many general internal medicine residents that call the DOC home during their residency. She enjoys teaching residents about the role of clinical social work in medicine and how to zoom out from viewing patients as a problem list to viewing them as a whole person. Elissa is honored to get to sit with patients at the DOC each day, bearing witness to their stories, strength, resilience, and wisdom. Getting to be a part of the Untold Stories Project has been one of the greatest honors of Elissa’s career thus far.
Michelle Tang, BA
Michelle is a fourth year medical student at Duke. Throughout her medical training, she has often wondered how she can better empathize with her patients in the future, how she can best honor their narratives and share their stories. During her first year of medical school, she participated in SCOPES, a student-led initiative committed to integrating the arts and humanities into medical education. This culminated in a project of ink and watercolor depicting the continuity of family across generations and the lives connected through each tree root and branch. It was through SCOPES that she first learned about Untold Stories during a guest lecture by Dr. Lee. Michelle is so grateful to be a part of the Untold Stories project, and to witness the powerful stories shared here. Michelle is passionate about discovering more about the person behind each patient that walks into the hospital or clinic. She hopes to maintain this curiosity for our inner narratives as she embarks on the road to her residency training and beyond, and to remind herself and those around her of the humanity in medicine every day. Her SCOPES project can be found here: https://sites.duke.edu/scopes/2022/08/08/this-moment-with-you/