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Director of Health Services
Leslie R. Jaffe, M.D. is a board certified pediatrician. Following his pediatric residency, he completed fellowship training in Adolescent Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He stayed there to work in the Adolescent Health Center, the largest medical school affiliated clinic for young people in the country. In 1982, he became Director of the Adolescent Health Center. Under his leadership, the AHC established the first high school based clinic in New York. He also developed an innovative HIV/AIDS prevention program for young people that was honored by the American Medical Association as the best in the country in 1989. In that year, Dr. Jaffe left Mt. Sinai to become Director of Health Services at Smith College. In his second year, he established a course on Women's Medical Issues which remains popular, with an enrollment of 85 students each spring semester. In 1997 Dr. Jaffe established the By Girls For Girls course for SSSEP.
Dr. Jaffe enjoys teaching and empowering students, high school and college, about the complexity of health. While young women need to understand how their bodies work, it is equally important for them to learn that health is broader than physical and science; it is about the interplay of gender, culture, race, class, economics and politics. He believes that young women need to develop awareness of media literacy to see how images taken for granted and fun in movies and music can be harmful to their well being. It’s also important to see health beyond the United States and to develop an awareness of global health issues that effect women. Each summer, Dr. Jaffe begins his By Girls For Girls program by asking the young women to answer the question “What do girls need to know to be healthy and safe?" By the end of the two weeks, the teen girls see health much more broadly than on that first day and have become engaged in social change, what they can do to make a difference for women in the world.
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Dr. Leslie Jaffe