Sonora, CA — The inaugural class of Adventist Health’s Hanford Sonora Family Residency Rural Training Program recently graduated.
They spent their first year of residency at Adventist Health’s Family Medicine Residency program in Hanford, California, experiencing a wide variety of clinical settings and complex pathology, with an emphasis on inpatient medicine (including pediatrics and obstetrics).
The second and third years of training were spent at Adventist Health Sonora. They built their clinical and patient care skills in the Adventist Health Sonora Rural Health Clinic, as well as at the inpatient hospital where a full range of faculty, specialists, and consultants was on hand to provide residents with experience designed to prepare them for careers caring for the unique challenges of rural communities.
For the last two years, Alem Abraha, MD; Stephanie Sanders, DO; Jeremiah O’Connor, DO; and Robert Verghese, MD; cared for patients at Adventist Health Sonora while training alongside experienced physician mentors.
“It has been my honor and privilege to be involved in the training of this first class of residents, and I am extremely proud of their effort and accomplishments and the contributions they have each made to our new program,” says Matthew Personius, MD, Associate Program Director for the Hanford Sonora Family Medicine Rural Training Program. “I look forward to hearing good things as they continue to learn and grow as family physicians and contribute to the communities they have chosen to serve.”
The graduation ceremony pictured above was held recently in Hanford.
As the first group graduates, Adventist Health Sonora is welcoming its newest resident physicians — Feben Messele, MD; Tuan-Viet Nguyen, MD; Gehrig Ornelas, DO; and Umair Tariq, MD — who have completed their first year of residency in Hanford and will spend the next two years at Adventist Health Sonora to complete the three-year program before graduating in 2028.
The class of 2028 joins current residents Madina Khamosh, MD; Ian O’Sullivan, MD; Iman Tassavvor, MD; and Andranik Vasilyan, MD. The eight family medicine physician residents provide primary care for patients of all ages at Adventist Health Sonora’s Primary Care Medical Office in Sonora, while also participating in block rotations to train in several specialties including behavioral health, emergency medicine, hospital inpatient care, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and surgery.
