Rachel Lee Gilgoff MD, CCTP, FAAP

Rachel Gilgoff, MD, FAAP is a board-certified child abuse pediatrician who has worked at the Center for Child Protection at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland since completing her fellowship training in 2007. As a child abuse pediatrician, she is involved with the evaluation, diagnosis and management of children who have been exposed to any form of child maltreatment including physical abuse, sexual abuse and neglect.

Dr. Gilgoff is dedicated to the prevention of child abuse and helped to update the most recent release of the California Attorney General's Office Child Abuse Prevention Handbook. She is passionate about teaching and has given a variety of lectures throughout the state of California to help inform doctors, nurses, social workers, lawyers, police officers and college students about drug endangered children, child abuse and the prevention of child abuse. She is also an active board member of the California Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (CAPSAC), a multidisciplinary team supporting professionals who serve families affected by violence. Her sensitive work as a forensic sexual abuse examiner and her collaboration with agencies throughout Alameda County earned her a Community Partnership Award in 2014, which was presented by Mutual of America and the Child Abuse Listening, Interviewing and Coordination Center (CALICO).

Dr. Gilgoff was recently accepted as one of three scholars to the Academy on Violence and Abuse (AVA) Scholars Program. Her AVA Scholars project will involve piloting a toxic stress prevention program designed for parents of newborns in a busy pediatric clinic. This project was inspired by the Adverse Child Experiences Study, which redefined behaviors such as over-eating, substance abuse, and promiscuity as people's solutions to an underlying childhood trauma. By applying the findings of the ACE studies to her own field, Dr. Gilgoff believes that child physical abuse could be seen as a parent's perceived resolution to overwhelming stress. Ultimately, Dr. Gilgoff feels that society must alter the traditional concepts of perpetrator and victim and transition to an integrated, intergenerational view that allows society to recognize the underlying victimization in the perpetrator's past, all while honoring the strength and resilience within all people that the word victim neglects.