By Herbert C. Ruckle ’86 Chair, DEPARTMENT OF UROLOGY

The Loma Linda University School of Medicine (LLUSM) department of urology has its roots in Los Angeles when the school used the White Memorial Medical Center and LA County Medical Center as their clinical teaching hospitals. Now in 2024 the urology department provides care in the new Troesh Medical Campus with a new adult hospital building and an expansion of the Children’s Hospital which opened in 2021.

Excellence in state-of-the-art clinical care, education, and research remains our focus and mission. The urology department is blessed to have a skilled, engaged, and cohesive team that includes 19 physician faculty members trained in various disciplines of urology including: urologic oncology, endourology, minimally invasive and robotic urologic surgery, urogynecology and pelvic reconstructive surgery, and pediatric urology. In addition, to facilitate comprehensive patient care and have better access for our community, we are proud to have 12 urology-specific advanced practice providers on our team. We expect the department to continue to grow.

To have a broad foundation for our teaching program, we also provide urology services at Riverside University Hospital,Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, Jerry L. Pettis VA Hospital, and Redlands Community Hospital. Muhannad Alsyouf, MD, (residency class of 2021) finished his fellowship in urologic oncology and joined Martin Hofmann, MD; Antoin Douglawi, MD; Brian Hu, MD; Paul D. Lui ’84; and Herbert C.
Ruckle ’86 to provide added capacity to care for patients with urological cancer. Alan Wong, MD, also recently joined Ashok Kar, MD, to provide general urology care at Riverside University Health System. Duane D. Baldwin ’91 does minimally invasive surgery and treats urinary stones. Forrest C. Jellison ’05, Andrea Staack, MD, and H. Roger Hadley ’74 practice in urogynecology and pelvic reconstructive surgery. David S. Benjamin ’91 does a large portfolio of general urology cases. David Chamberlin, MD, leads the pediatric urology division including Minh Chau, MD, Joshua D. Chamberlin ’12, and soon to be joined by Catherine Nguyen, MD. Tekisha Lindler, MD, and Victor C. Ching ’77-A are at the VA Hospital, and Robert R. Torrey Jr. ’71, James Agee, MD, and Junchan Yune, MD, are based in Redlands at the Beaver Legacy/Optum practice.

Education of medical students and residents is a major part of the mission of our department. Jellison recently became the program director, and Hu is the associate director. Jenny Morrow is the new residency coordinator. Our most recent graduate, Mohammad Kehelia, MD, who completed his residency in June 2023, went into private practice in North Carolina.

We now have three residents per year, and our current chief residents finishing in 2024 are Stephanie Jensen, MD; Aviram Assidon, MD; and Cayde Ritchie, MD. After graduation, Jensen will begin a reconstructive urology fellowship at City of Hope, Ritchie will start a pediatric urology fellowship at Stanford University, and Assidon is entering private practice in Florida. Our own Loma Linda endourology fellowship program also continues to thrive under the direction of Baldwin. Akin Amasyali, MD, will graduate this year and begin academic practice in Pennsylvania.

The urology residency and endourology fellowship programs are incubators for new research ideas and innovations. This past summer, multiple faculty and residents in our department directed 15 enthusiastic medical and undergraduate students who completed the summer research program, gained exposure to the process of medical research, and were participating authors in multiple publications. Our department presented papers at international, national, and local conferences with several of our faculty serving as invited speakers. A total of 80 abstracts were presented in 2023. We continue to be involved in multicenter clinical trials in urologic oncology and pediatric urology. In 2023, our department produced 22 peer-reviewed publications.

As the department of urology provides state-of-the-art high- quality patient care, teaches, innovates, and discovers, we strive to uphold the values of excellence, integrity, teamwork, compassion, and wholeness. Our goal is to lengthen and improve our patients’ lives and to relieve suffering caused by urologic disease. Teaching and living our values are what differentiate our efforts as we continue the Healing Ministry of Jesus Christ.

Any of our LLUSM alumni network are welcome to contact us at 909-558-8724 or hruckle@llu.edu if we can help facilitate urology care for your patients.  ν

Herbert C. Ruckle ’86 is a urology professor at LLUSM. He completed residency in urology at LLU, followed by a fellowship in urology cancer surgery at the Mayo Clinic.