Can you tell us a little about your professional journey and how you got into emergency medicine? 

I wanted to be a doctor since childhood. In fact, as a kid, I insisted that my mother read to me out of the Reader’s Digest Encyclopedia of Diseases every night at bedtime.  She obliged, until I came home from preschool one day announcing that I had some unusual tropical disease, then she cut me off.  I continued to pursue my interest in medicine through volunteering for the Red Cross through high school and then got my EMT certification and a job as a nocturnal ER Tech to help pay my way through college. I always also had a passion for education and worked as a tutor and teacher in various capacities through high school and college.  In medical school, I tried really hard to find another specialty that I loved because I didn’t want to choose EM simply because it was what I was familiar with, but I finally accepted that EM was simply the right choice for my personality and skillset. I did my residency at the University of Pittsburgh and an Education Scholarship Fellowship at Harbor-UCLA.  I have served in multiple roles in both UME and GME including Assistant and Interim Clerkship Director, Assistant and Associate Residency Director, Vice Chair of the Acute Care College, and Director of Discovery, which is a course that comprises the majority of the third year of the medical school curriculum at UCLA.  I am currently an Associate Residency Director at UCLA Health.

What motivated you to join the CORD Board of Directors? 

CORD has always seemed like a home to me, a place where educators can find innovative information and support.   I found such immense fulfilment from my experience in the CORD community including the MERC at CORD program, education committee, program committee, and academy for scholarship and was really proud of the work we were able to accomplish together. So I decided to run for the board in 2020 and have thoroughly enjoyed serving ever since.  Who’d have known that a global pandemic would only be the start to a number of widespread challenges facing our specialty. Serving in a leadership position during such challenging times has pushed me to think even more critically, creatively and collaboratively about issues our organization and our members face both big and small.  I am more motivated than ever to continue to serving in a leadership role for the organization in order to continue working collaboratively with other organizations to find solutions to some of the most pressing issues facing emergency medicine educators and learners, to provide evidence to justify educator needs to regulatory bodies so that we may provide the best education to our learners, and to continue to support our community through innovation and the development of evidence-based resources and faculty development.  I am immensely honored to be part of the CORD community and I hope to continue to working with the great minds of the CORD membership and leadership to shape emergency medicine at the national level.

Are there any particular projects that you are personally involved in and excited about?

I am passionate about education research and have a number of projects that I am excited about.  I am involved in our CORD initiative to assess the time and work activities of core faculty and program leadership to truly understand the manpower required to provide training in emergency medicine so that we may advocate for necessary support and resources.  We are also wrapping up a multi-year, multi-institution, research study around EM resident career decisions and their changes over time including influences of individual preferences and institutional characteristics so that we can best support trainees in these important decisions.  With the CORD education committee, I am also working on a best practice paper and scoping review of “resident as teacher” programs and hope that the insights gleaned from this work will inform other programs across the country.

Is there anything else you would like to share? 

I’m a proud mom to a 10 year old son and 8 year old daughter.  We love to travel and will be exploring Serbia and Spain this summer!