For nearly 40 years, obstetrician and gynecologist Anita Nelson, MD, has been a fierce advocate for women's health, directing essential family planning clinics, performing innovative research and patient care, and teaching the next generation of nurse practitioners and OBGYN residents.

But medicine was not her initial career path. Nelson's first degree was a BA in economics from Occidental College, after which she spent seven years with the US Army Corps of Engineers doing economic analyses of harbors, dams, and flood control projects.

Toward the end of her time with the US Army Corps, Dr. Nelson became interested in medicine through volunteer work and started taking classes at UC Irvine toward a second bachelor's-this time in biology. One year after leaving the field of economics, she was on her way to earning an MD from UCLA, during which she did rotations at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. "I fell in love with it," she says. "I rated Harbor as my first choice for residency and was lucky enough to get chosen."

Toward the end of her residency in 1985, which ran from 1981 to 1986, she was offered the opportunity to oversee the Women's Health Care Nurse Practitioner Education Programs at LA BioMed, now known as The Lundquist Institute (TLI). "It was a really unique position because it was in many ways a direct partnership between the Institute and Los Angeles County, which had established a training program for nurse practitioners from 17 Western states and Micronesia," says Dr. Nelson, who was medical director of the program from 1985 to 2013. "We had graduates from the Bering Straits, from the inner cities of Los Angeles, from North Dakota, the rural areas of Oregon, from Samoa and Guam and just all kinds of areas where they were able to bring services to women who otherwise wouldn't get them."

But running the Nurse Practitioner program wasn't the only position she added to her resume in 1985. All while finishing out her residency, she became the medical director of the Women's Health Care Clinic in building N-28 on the Institute campus, a member of the Division of Gynecology at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, an assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the UCLA School of Medicine, and Medical Director for the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program for the southern part of Los Angeles County.

"I inherited this really rich system and was able to, in conjunction with the residency that was ongoing and all the care that was going on at the hospital, really make new innovations," says Dr. Nelson, of the collaborative care network she and her colleagues were able to build between the Nurse Practitioner program, the women's health clinic, the WIC program, and TLI. "We were able to transform the clinic into a very productive site for research because we were seeing so many patients and many of them were excited to be involved in the development of new contraceptive options or new ways of providing care."

Nelson says she and her colleagues tested, at the Institute, just about every new birth control product that came out for 10 years, including, in recent years, male contraceptive implants. In the late nineties, Nelson was part of a study examining whether a woman needed a pap smear, a full physical examination, STD tests, and a breast exam just to get a prescription for birth control pills. "Our clinic was very vigorous in studying this. We put our little project in the WIC center in Compton so women coming to pick up their food coupons could get started on contraception right away," says Dr. Nelson. "The results of the study, published in the JournaloftheAmericanMedical Association,showed that women did seek other care, but they didn't have big delays in getting their contraception by all these barriers being in the way. But I'll tell you, it took 10 years before the Centers for Disease Control adopted that as the standard of care."

Another major study to which Nelson and TLI researchers made significant contributions was an exploration of what could be done to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted infections. According to Nelson, the classic model was that a patient is tested, found to be positive, treated, and then a report is sent to public health officials to track down her contacts to try and treat them. The study team proposed a new model in which women who knew the partner that infected them could simply take home a prescription or even the drug to share. "If we treated her partner directly, would that reduce her chance of getting reinfected? And the answer was yes, it did," explains Dr. Nelson. "And that's now a CDC standard called expedited partner therapy."

The driving force behind these research successes, and many others-Nelson has been involved in nearly 200 research projects and coauthored more than 150 peer-reviewed papers-as well as her career in general, is a deep belief in the power of education. "The investment, not only in the residents and the residency programs, but from the Institute standpoint, going into the high schools and getting people interested in medical research is so important," says Dr. Nelson. "We also gave continuing education to a lot of the community members. Anytime something new came out, we would teach them how to use it, or we would do continuing education courses for nurses and physicians, so we were able to really contribute in so many ways to the quality of care that women basically throughout Southern California got."

In fact, although no longer a practicing physician or a faculty member at TLI, she is still very active in research and education and says that her time at the Institute was an absolute honor. Ever the multi-hyphenate, Nelson now serves as a volunteer teacher at USC and Children's Hospital Los Angeles, as Medical Director of the research division at Essential Access Health, which conducts clinical trials, and as Professor and Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Western University of Health Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific.

"What I love is that, even though I'm not on faculty at Harbor, I'm able to collaborate and bring my students from Western who are interested in women's care over to Harbor, and through the Institute they get to do research with the faculty," says Dr. Nelson. "Paying it forward is the important thing. You're turning out new people who have been inspired and intrigued by research. Getting them started in meaningful research and putting together this powerful package where you've got patients that have problems and minds in the Institute who can help solve them is just incredible."