Jenny Murase, MD, is driven in her career to be the best clinician, teacher, and mentor she can be. She has worked tirelessly to become an expert clinician treating complex itch and rash conditions, one her colleagues routinely rely on for diagnostic and treatment advice.
Her journey to become a medical consultative physician has involved practice — lots of practice. Dr. Murase estimates she’s done 7,000 consults for dermatologists and allergists over the past 18 years and has patch tested about 4,000 people. In addition to clinical care, Murase is passionate about teaching. She works closely with medical students, residents, nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). She teaches them about clinical matters and serves as a trusted resource for their personal and professional development.
For her dedication to blending clinical excellence with teaching, writing, and mentorship, Murase is the recipient of the Dermatology Foundation’s 2025 Clark W. Finnerud Award.
“Having some of my former students at the award presentation was so important to me,” Murase said. “So much of dermatology’s strength lies in inspiring the next generation. As a mentor, my role is to support students and encourage them to drive innovation in our field — to motivate them to consider the ways that they can contribute to our field given their unique background and to cultivate their passion for dermatology. That is ultimately how we make the most meaningful impact on the greatest number of people suffering from skin disease.”
Murase is Director of Medical Consultative Dermatology and Patch Testing at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Mountain View, CA, and associate clinical professor of Dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She graduated in 2003 from the University of California, Irvine College of Medicine.
The daughter of a schoolteacher and an engineer, Murase learned early on the value of community and the discipline of hard work. She brings these qualities to her roles as a teacher, mentor, and researcher. It’s the superpower she inherited from her parents.
She strives to nurture a passion for dermatology, which she’s noticed is often driven by her mentees’ unique personal experiences. One of her students, as a girl, was mocked by other children at her school because of her dark skin tone. The bleaching creams she was using led to skin disfigurement and scarring, which required treatment from a dermatologist. Murase, who has been a member of the Skin of Color Society since 2020, helped guide this student to develop a curriculum for residency programs to address implicit bias and the threat of stereotype in the clinical encounter for patients with skin of color. The curriculum won the Shaping the Future Award at the society’s scientific symposium in 2022.
Dr. Jenny Murase (left) holding her award with DF President Dr. Janet Fairley.
Treating itch and rash in the Bay Area
Her interest in dermatology began early in medical school when she saw a woman covered head to toe with severe psoriasis. The only time the patient had been clear of psoriasis was during her three pregnancies. To find out why, Murase designed a study that took four years of medical school to complete. She was awarded several grants from the NIH and other organizations to correlate blood levels of hormones with psoriasis severity in 65 patients (Murase et al. 2005).
“I loved learning that skin is a window into the immune system,” she said. This fascination — and her care for the suffering of her patients — has allowed Murase to build a reputation for treating seemingly intractable cases of itch and rash. “In terms of impact on quality of life, having chronic itch in pediatric AD is between having a severe kidney disease and having cystic fibrosis. In my consultative clinic.” Murase notes they use the tissue box as much as the intake from the nursing staff.
She provides patient care in the clinic three days per week, performs consults for other dermatologists and allergists with diagnostic conundrums, and has created a patch test subspecialty clinic to identify allergic contact dermatitis.
An important early mentor in Murase’s career was Tim Berger, MD, whom she met while volunteering at the resident clinic at UCSF. She was honored when Berger asked her to join him in his medical consultative clinic. From the beginning of her practice, allergists and dermatologists who were stumped by recalcitrant rash and itch cases began referring patients to her. After assessing patients, she’d ask for feedback on the cases from her peers at grand rounds primarily at UCSF where she was volunteer faculty and also occasionally at Stanford. Watching Berger process patients weekly helped set her on a journey to become a medical consultative physician. For 14 years she also took difficult cases to Berger, who received the Dermatology Foundation Lifetime Career Educator Award in 2023.
When Dupixent (dupilumab) was approved by the FDA in 2017 it offered a tailored treatment for atopic dermatitis that specifically addressed the allergic arm of the immune system instead of suppressing cell-mediated immunity. But what Murase initially saw confused her.
“At our clinic in Mountain View, where we did patch testing, we’d have home run after home run on Dupixent,” she said. “But at Dr. Berger’s clinic at UCSF the dermatitis on patients’ bodies would clear, but they’d have residual dermatitis on their face or hands.”
The Clark W. Finnerud Award: What it Takes
The Clark W. Finnerud Award honors dermatologists who are part-time clinicians and part-time teachers. Established in 1971, the award bears the name of the late Dr. Clark W. Finnerud, a dedicated teacher and clinician who served the Rush Medical School for 47 years. This award honors not only part-time teachers but also Dr. Finnerud for his achievements, foresight, and generosity.
Most clinicians at the time thought it was a side effect of the new medication. However, Murase’s experience as both a medical consultative physician and a patch test physician allowed her to deduce the real reason. She realized that not all of the patients at the UCSF clinic had been patch tested. They actually had two diagnoses — Dupixent, by removing the atopic dermatitis on the body, was unmasking the allergic contact dermatitis on their face and hands. Her subsequent study showed that patch testing and allergen avoidance resulted in most patients becoming clear of residual dermatitis on their faces and hands. This resulted in publication of a paper which won the Article of the Year Award in Dermatitis, the journal of the American Contact Dermatitis Society (Ashbaugh et al. 2022).
Murase was recently chosen as deputy chair of the Clinical Guidelines Committee for the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD). She is working on clarifying the diagnostic criteria for patients with itch and rash, which is important to make the correct and, sometimes, life-saving diagnosis.
“I’ve seen patients who were incorrectly told they had hives or dermatitis when they actually had Hodgkin’s lymphoma or follicular centric lymphoma,” she said. “A lack of diagnostic testing prevented these patients from having a correct diagnosis, one that allows us to get them on the right therapy as quickly as possible.”
Encouraging doctors to plan for the long run
Along the way, Murase learned that to be an effective clinician, teacher, and researcher, she needed strategies to address challenges that often derail the careers of women, especially mothers.
She has watched her students finish residency really excited about their chosen field. Then the reality kicks in of managing a huge workload once they start in practice. Murase knows how exhausting it can be to see 30+ patients a day.
“Oftentimes this is when my young dermatology colleagues start to have children,” said Murase, the mother of three teenagers. “They have such passion for our field and such good intentions, and they want to continue to contribute to our field by reviewing articles, creating expert resource groups or educational content for the academy, or publishing. Unfortunately, these are the first things that get sacrificed with the onslaught of a busy clinic and childcare responsibilities, that still fall disproportionately on the mother in many cases.”
She doesn’t want the message to these young physicians starting their careers, and particularly the women, to be “You can do it. Just keep going.” She knows that this path leads to burn out. Instead, Murase offers talks about personal and professional development for residency programs.
“I want all my young colleagues, particularly the women, to intentionally plan for a well-balanced life so they can keep contributing to dermatology. I want them to understand how to plan with intention and to get the right support for themselves so they can continue to make important contributions to our field” she said.
Women’s health expert
When Murase finished her residency, she saw that the women’s health curriculum at the AAD needed improvement, especially more teaching for residents and dermatologists on the safety of meds during pregnancy and lactation, and dermatologic care for breastfeeding mothers.
“Breastfeeding mothers having issues with atopic dermatitis and psoriasis, candidal mastitis, Raynaud phenomenon, and a variety of lactation-related issues. There was no education on the breast in the Academy.”
This lack of education meant she saw pregnant patients being counselled to be wary of using over-the-counter, low risk medications like benzoyl peroxide or hydrocortisone cream because the dermatologist didn’t have the training about the safety risks associated with topical corticosteroids during residency or in post-residency CME.
Murase has published extensively on the safety of medicines in pregnancy and lactation (Murase et al. 2014; Butler et al. 2014; Murase et al. 2024). She served as co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Women’s Dermatologyfor four years, founded and is chair of the ADD’s Women’s Health expert resource group (ERG), is past Secretary of the Women’s Dermatologic Society, where she has been a member since 2005. She has directed more than 30 symposiums for the AAD, EADV and World Congress on topics related to women’s health and has built a global community of key opinion leaders in this subspecialty.
At an EADV Pregnancy Task Force meeting, a key opinion leader reported that one of their pregnant patients with untreated atopic dermatitis almost committed suicide. The provider had instructed the patient to stop taking Dupixent because they weren’t sure about the risk of the medication to the pregnancy. It takes many years for the Mother-to-Baby pregnancy registry data to be released, and providers are unsure how to advise patients without this data.
“I asked my colleagues in atopic dermatitis and in women’s health to get me cases as quickly as possible so we could assess the risks,” Murase said. She received 83 cases from colleagues around the world, which showed that Dupixent does not appear to increase risk during pregnancy. This work offers reassurance to patients and providers globally asthe field awaits company registry data, expected in 2027 (in press, 2025). “There’s such goodwill in the field. I was very proud of the response I received from all of my fellow dermatologists, particularly from my colleagues in Europe.”
Murase said she has placed over 800 patients on Dupixent (dupilumab)in the past 8 years and over 100 patients on Nemluvio (nemolizumab) in the past 8 months and regularly uses all of the biologics and immunosuppressants for atopic dermatitis to treat complex itch and rash patients. This clinical experience has allowed her the ability to understand how the medications can be used effectively to treat a variety of skin conditions that involve itch and rash.
How the Foundation inspires innovation
“To receive this award at this juncture in my life makes me humbled, especially because I still feel junior in my career. People have joked that when you start to get awards it means you’ll retire soon. But there’s so much more I want to contribute to our field for many years to come.”
Her involvement with the Dermatology Foundation began early in her career when Jack Resneck JR., MD, invited Murase to speak about women’s health at the Foundation’s annual Clinical Symposium in Florida.
“It’s important to see patients and contribute to clinical care,” she said. “But we must protect the field of dermatology. It’s the foundation of knowledge and expertise that allows us to improve patients’ lives. The field exists in the conversations we have with each other as dermatologists or with our mentees and residents, on the podium when we’re presenting, and in the pages of our medical literature.
If I prescribe Dupixent to a patient with Netherton syndrome and they improve, for example, if I do not share this information, I do not advance our field. But if I present on this case, or share it with colleagues, or publish it, then we strengthen our field by documenting how novel therapies can be used to advance the treatment of genetic skin diseases.
“That’s what makes what the Dermatology Foundation so precious. Its programs are focused on making sure we have strong science to strengthen the therapeutics and diagnostics we have to further our understanding of skin disease. We need to invest in our future by supporting those who strive to keep our field strong — that is how we maximize our impact on the reduction of human suffering from skin disease.”
Learn more about DF Honorary Awards.
References
Ashbaugh AG, Murase EM, Raffi J, et al. Characterization of Residual Facial Dermatitis during Dupilumab Therapy: A Retrospective Chart Review to Delineate the Potential Role of Expanded Series Patch Testing. Dermatitis. 2022;33(1):51–61.https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1097/DER.0000000000000801
Butler DC, Heller MM, Murase JE. Continuing Medical Education: Safety of Dermatologic Medications in Pregnancy and Lactation (Part 2 Lactation). J Amer Acad Dermatol. 2014;70: 417–426.
Murase JE, Chan KK, Garite TJ, et al. Hormonal effect on psoriasis in pregnancy and post partum. Arch Dermatol. 2005;141(5):601–606.
Murase JE, Heller MM, Butler DC. Continuing Medical Education: Safety of Dermatologic Medications in Pregnancy and Lactation (Part 1 Pregnancy). J Amer Acad Dermatol. 2014;70:401–414.
Yahgi M, McMullan P, Rothe M, Grant-Kels J*, Murase JE*. Safety of dermatologic medications in pregnancy and lactation: An Update Part 2: Lactation. J Amer Acad Dermatol. 2024 Oct;91(4):651-668. doi: 10.1016/j.jaad.2023.10.071. *Co-senior authors.
Yahgi M, McMullan P, Rothe M, Grant-Kels J*, Murase JE*. Response to Smith and Shaw “Response to “Safety of dermatologic medications in pregnancy and lactation: An Update – Part 1: Pregnancy & Part 2: Lactation.” J Amer Acad Dermatol. 2024 Aug;91(2):e35-e36. doi: 10.1016/j.jaad.2024.04.017. *Co-senior authors.