Hospice & Palliative Care Fellowship Program Directors
Tolúwalàse "Làse" Àjàyí, M.D., FAAP
Palliative Medicine Clinical Professor, UCSD & Rady Children’s Hospital
Dr. Ajayi holds a joint faculty appointment at UC San Diego in the departments of medicine, pediatrics, and family medicine, and serves as Program Director of the joint UC San Diego and Scripps Health Hospice & Palliative Medicine Fellowship. At Rady Children's Hospital San Diego, she is the founding Chief of the Division of Pediatric Palliative Care. She is also the Digital Health Equity Lead at the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation.
Dr. Ajayi is a dual board-certified pediatrician and a fellowship-trained specialist in adult and pediatric palliative medicine. She cares for newborns as a hospitalist, for seriously ill children in their own homes through pediatric palliative care, and for adults living with serious illness as an inpatient palliative medicine consultant. That breadth — from the first days of a newborn's life to the final days of an adult's — directly shapes how she trains fellows.
She is also a nationally recognized leader in health policy and organized medicine. She Chairs the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association and is a past president of the San Diego County Medical Society.
Her research works at the intersection of digital medicine and unmet clinical need — in maternal-fetal health, pain, and palliative care where her goal is to close health disparities and bring communities long left out of research into the evidence base. Her aim across all of this work is consistent: better symptom management, honest communication, and a higher quality of life for seriously ill patients of every age.
"Our fellows are walking into a health system that asks more of physicians every year,” Lase says, “My job is to send them out able to manage the most complex symptoms, hold the hardest conversations, and speak up for patients the system too often overlooks. Watching fellows grow into that work is why I teach."
Holly Yang, M.D.
Hospice and Palliative Medicine, Scripps
Holly Yang, MD, MSHPEd, HMDC, MACP, FAAHPM, is a consultant in Palliative Medicine for the Scripps Health system and holds a voluntary faculty appointment with UC San Diego’s Department of Medicine. She trained in Internal Medicine at the University of Minnesota, followed by Hospice and Palliative Medicine fellowship training at San Diego Hospice and the Institute for Palliative Medicine. She earned her Masters of Science in Health Professions Education from the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Professions.
Dr. Yang is a Trustee of for the California Medical Association (CMA), serves as Chair of the Governance Technical Advisory Committee for CMA, and is a delegate from California to the American Medical Association House of Delegates. She was the 150th President of the San Diego County Medical Society (SDCMS) in 2020-21 during the COVID pandemic, and remains on the SDCMS Board of Directors. She is a past-president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative (2023-24), and continues to serve on the Curriculum and Faculty Development Committee as well as the Hospice Workgroup. Dr. Yang enjoys teaching serious illness communication skills as distinguished faculty and a strategic partner for VitalTalk nationally and internationally, and serves as faculty in Upaya Institute’s Being with Dying program.