Interviews

Karen J. Nichols, DO, MA, MACOI, FACP, CS-F is the current Chair of the ACGME Board of Directors, having assumed this role in September 2020. We asked Dr. Nichols to talk about her professional experience, her role, and her experience with the ACGME’s first-ever virtual Annual Educational Conference.

At the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, Athena Gonzalez and her team presented their poster, Strategies for Optimizing Fit Testing for Residents and the Evolving Role of the Program Coordinator, about their work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure residents were wearing properly sized and fitted masks and respirators, even as supplies changed.

Bree Bower and her team in the anesthesiology and pain medicine department at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio studied the affects of COVID-19 on fellow recruitment and presented that work at the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference in the Poster Hall.

In the poster, Waging War Against Physician Burnout: Overcoming the Barriers of Military Medicine with Personalized Patient Care Boards, presented at the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, Dr. Jessika Weber and colleagues present their project that looked at how customized care boards in pediatric patient rooms are helping young patients.

2021 Debra L. Dooley GME Program Coordinator Excellence Awardee Dawn Fountain works in the general surgery residency program at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita.

At the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, Dr. Tina Simpson presented her team’s work in the poster, Implementing an Anti-Racism Workshop at an Academic University in the Deep South for Graduate Medical Education.

2021 GME Debra L. Dooley GME Program Coordinator Excellence Awardee Debra (Debbie) Kay Stevens is the program administrator for internal medicine at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University.

2021 Debra L. Dooley GME Program Coordinator Excellence Awardee Adam Finney is a program coordinator for child neurology and pediatric epilepsy at the University of Colorado.

2021 Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Ann Schwartz, MD is the director of residency education in psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine.

Debra L. Dooley GME Program Coordinator Excellence Awardee Jennifer Wilson, BA, C-TAGME is the GME program administrator for family medicine at the University of Vermont (UVM) Medical Center.