Associate Professor

Medical College of Wisconsin

Dr. Padela is a clinician-researcher with scholarship foci at the intersections of religious identity, healthcare, and bioethics.

His empirical work focuses on developing tailored community-based interventions tacking Muslim health disparities, and his normative scholarship focused on the ethics of cultural accommodations of provider and patient identities in the halls of medicine. He also studies the impact of discrimination on Muslim patient and providers.

SAEM Member-at-Large

UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas

Ava E. Pierce, MD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, the Associate Chair of Diversity and Inclusion for the Department of Emergency Medicine, the Director of the Emergency Medicine Research Associate Program, a Co-Director of the Joint Admission Medical Program (JAMP) at UT Southwestern and works clinically at Parkland Health and Hospital Systems. She obtained her medical degree from Louisiana State University School of Medicine at Shreveport and completed an emergency medicine residency at Emory University School of Medicine.

Dr. Pierce completed the Medical Education Research Certificate (MERC) Program and the AAMC Healthcare Executive Diversity and Inclusion Certificate Program and is committed to making innovative changes that will enhance diversity and inclusion and improve excellence in health care, thus strengthening a diverse workforce that will provide culturally competent quality medical care to all. She serves as a member UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Medical School Admissions Committee and is a faculty liaison for Housestaff Emerging Academy of Leaders (HEAL), which focuses on professional development and mentoring for residents and fellows from under-represented groups. Her research interests include medical education, diversity and inclusion, and cardiac resuscitation.

Dr. Pierce has built a steadfast academic career with involvement in numerous capacities at SAEM. She has been actively involved in the Academy for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Medicine (ADIEM) since it was founded and has served as ADIEM’s development officer and president. She was awarded ADIEM’s Outstanding Academician Award in recognition of her impact on the academic success of students and residents from underrepresented minority groups. She has also been a member of SAEM’s Membership Committee, SAEM’s Ethics Committee and SAEM’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. She is an elected 2020-2021 member-at Large of the Board of Directors of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM). She is member of the National Medical Association, the AAMC Group on Diversity and Inclusion, and a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion; Associate Dean for Diversity and Community Engagement

Thomas Jefferson University

Bernard L. Lopez, MD, MS, is Professor and Executive Vice Chair in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA. He received his Doctorate in Medicine from the Sidney Kimmel Medical College in 1986. He completed a residency training program in Emergency Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in 1989. Since 2013, Dr. Lopez has served as the Associate Dean for Diversity and Community Engagement in the medical school, providing oversight of diversity and inclusion initiatives for faculty, graduate medical education and medical students. In January 2017, he added the title of Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion at Thomas Jefferson University, providing oversight and guidance for the ten colleges that make up the university.

Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine

Emory University School of Medicine

Dr. Salhi is dual trained in Emergency Medicine and Anthropology, having completed a PhD examining homeless super-utilizers at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research focuses on underserved populations, social determinants of health, and housing deprivation in the Emergency Department.

Director, Section of International and Domestic Health Equity and Leadership (IDHEAL), UCLA

Olive View-UCLA Medical Center

Dr. Taira is an emergency physician and the Director of Research for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Olive View- UCLA Medical Center. In 2016, she became director of the Section of International and Domestic Health Equity and Leadership (IDHEAL) for the UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine whose mission is to define and promote the role that academic emergency medicine can play in the promotion of health equity and elimination of health disparities locally, nationally and globally. (www.idheal.org) Her research focuses on improving quality of care and health outcomes for patients with limited English proficiency. She speaks locally and nationally on language justice and communication in health care.

Secretary-Treasurer

University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry

"I am an assistant professor and associate residency program director in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Rochester. I have been interested in diversity and inclusion for several years in the realm of advocating for the deaf ASL user and others who require accommodations, leading me to join ADIEM several years ago. Inspired by leadership in ADIEM, I created the Accommodations Committee to partner with others with similar interests. Together, we have created educational training sessions and publications to disseminate information about a marginalized group. With the experience and knowledge gained through networking and my own self growth/education, I have been able to advocate for a marginalized group locally, regionally, and nationally through workshops (multiple national grand rounds), publications, and didactic sessions (SAME 2019-2021). I was also in charge of planning the pre-conference ADIEM session for the 2020-21 national conference. I am currently a member-at-large (2021-2022) and was previously a general member.

I am running for office out of desire for continued support of an organization with an incredible mission: to advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves. I have a track record of being well organized and am facile with technology. I will be able to keep track of clear and concise meeting notes, goals/objectives of the meeting, and the trajectory of our group. I also have some previous treasurer role experience as the treasurer of a collegiate extracurricular group where I transitioned our group from paper tracking to a clear and easy-to-follow excel format. I look forward tp contributing to the group in any way I can to support our mission."

Dr. Rotoli is the Assistant Residency Director of the Emergency Medicine residency at the University of Rochester. Through local and national experiential didactics, simulation, and formal assessment, he seeks to improve provider cultural awareness by increasing awareness of the needs of vulnerable populations (especially the culturally Deaf community). Recently, Dr. Rotoli has become the Director of the Deaf Health Pathways, a medical student elective at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Through this role, he hopes to have a positive influence on students early in their careers in caring for Deaf ASL users, who are a linguistic and cultural minority. He hopes to continue to improve Deaf patient health care delivery and medical knowledge through providing direct access and communication to an ASL fluent physician while working clinically in the emergency department at Strong Memorial Hospital.

Member-at-Large

University of Utah School of Medicine

Jeff Druck, MD, is the Vice Chair for Faculty Advancement, DEI and Wellbeing of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine, as well as being a Professor within the Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Druck grew up in Houston, Texas, went to Rice University for his undergraduate degree, received his MD degree from Baylor College of Medicine, and he completed his residency at the Denver Health Residency Program in Emergency Medicine. He is board certified in Emergency Medicine and has served as an oral examiner for ABEM for the past 14 years.

Dr. Druck is an expert in emergency medicine education and in DEI, having served as the chair of his department’s DEI committee, an associate residency director, President of the school’s faculty senate, Student Affairs Dean, and Co-Director of the Office of Professional Excellence at the University of Colorado prior to his move to Utah.

In addition to serving on the SAEM Board of Directors, Dr. Druck has served as President of the Academy for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Medicine (ADIEM) as well as Co-Chair of the SAEM Consensus conference on Racism in Emergency Medicine. He has served on SAEM’s Awards committee, Program Committee, Consultation Committee, the Faculty Development Committee, and previously directed the Chief Resident Forum. He can be found on LinkedIn at @JeffDruck

Residency Program Director, Associate Professor

Virginia Commonwealth University

Joel Moll is residency Program Director and Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He previously served as Associate Program Director at the University of Michigan, and Assistant Program Director and Administration Fellowship Director at Emory University. Although always interested in education, Dr. Moll started his career in operations, and was medical director at Cleveland Clinic Florida and the University of Florida Gainesville prior to joining residency leadership. He has published multiple peer reviewed articles and textbook chapters, presents internationally and nationally, and has served on many national committees. He is Past President of the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine’s Academy of Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Medicine, and an oral boards examiner for the American Board of Emergency Medicine. He was recently honored to be named the VCU Health Leadership in Medical Education Residency Director of the year, and the recipient of the VCU School of Medicine Leonard Tow Humanism Award. Interests include graduate medical education, curriculum development, diversity and inclusion, and evidence-based medicine.

Associate Professor

University of Texas Southwestern

Dr. Klein originally hails from NYC and has lived everywhere from New York to Maine, and Michigan to Texas with brief stints in the UK and the Caribbean. Her career paths have taken her in many directions from sailing on traditional sailboats, teaching environmental and experiential education; to prehospital work in wilderness medicine, search and rescue, flight paramedic and finally after a dare to going to medical school and becoming an emergency medicine physician. She completed her residency at Detroit Receiving Hospital in Michigan, which was followed by a two year CDC funded fellowship in WMD-Disaster Medicine and EMS where she engaged in hands on disaster courses in radiation, chemical, biological, and decontamination. Aside from academia, she is part of a DMAT, which has allowed her to be deployed to multiple real world disaster events. At present, she is an associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern medical center at Dallas where she is part of the division of Emergency and Disaster Global Health and clinically works at Parkland Hospital. She is an active instructor both nationally and internationally for the National Disaster Life Support Foundation series of courses and has the privilege of being an associate editor for the “purple journal”. She continues to lecture on disaster and EM topics nationally and internationally and is about to embark on an MPH.

Vice Chair of Education and Program Director

UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas

Dr. Velez was born and raised in Puerto Rico, where she studied emergency Medicine before moving to Dallas for a tox fellowship and have been affiliated with UTSW since then. She has been the PD since 2011 and vice chair for education in the last three years. Passionate about education, cultural competency, and anything tox.

Chair, Emergency Medicine

MGB Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital

Dr. Leon Sanchez is currently the Chief of Emergency Medicine at the MGB Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital and an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Prior to that, Dr. Sanchez was the Vice Chair for Network Operations at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is a nationally recognized expert in the field of Emergency Medicine Operations and his areas of recent focus include operational improvement, patient flow and throughput optimization, queuing, and schedule optimization.

Professor & System Vice Chair of Emergency Medicine

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Lynne D. Richardson, MD, FACEP, is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Professor of Population Health Science & Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and System Vice Chair for the Department of Emergency Medicine of the Mount Sinai Health System. A native New Yorker, she holds Bachelor’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Life Sciences and Management; and an MD degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She completed the Emergency Medicine Residency at Jacobi Hospital/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she served as Chief Resident. Dr. Richardson became a Diplomate of the American Board of Emergency Medicine in 1985, launching a remarkable career as a clinician, an educator, a researcher and an advocate. Dr. Richardson is now one of the most accomplished investigators in emergency medicine and one of its most respected research mentors; her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Richardson joined the faculty at Mount Sinai in 1995 to establish the Mount Sinai Emergency Medicine Residency, which, under her leadership, emerged as one of the premiere training programs on the East Coast. In 2002, she left the Program Director position to become Director of the Research Division. She has recruited a cadre of talented clinician investigators and, through a strong emphasis on mentoring and multi-disciplinary collaborations, she has built a research program that currently ranks #2 in the country in NIH funding. She remains involved in physician education at both the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. In addition to teaching emergency medicine, she is a member of the Ethics faculty and teaches in the Masters of Public Health program. Her research interests include the use of clinical and administrative data to investigate issues of access, quality and equity; developing and assessing the effectiveness of strategies to eliminate health care disparities, particularly through the use of electronic health record (EHR)-embedded clinical decision support tools; and care redesign featuring innovative models of emergency care and emergency department-based care coordination and care transition interventions to support population health initiatives and improve patient outcomes. She is an expert on community engagement and a national thought leader in the ethics of conducting emergency research. Her mixed-methods "Community VOICES" studies have defined best practices for community consultation in exception from informed consent research. Dr. Richardson has made highly influential contributions to eliminating healthcare disparities in both the research and policy arenas. She is a member of the New York City Board of Health, the first emergency physician ever to serve in that Board's more than one hundred and fifty year history. She serves on the Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) of the Centers for Disease Control and is the current Chair of the ACD Health Disparities Subcommittee. She has received numerous awards for distinguished service, exceptional leadership, and outstanding teaching from various academic institutions, professional organizations and community groups. In 2016, Dr. Richardson was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Vice Chair of Education

Baylor College of Medicine

Dr. M. Tyson Pillow completed his undergraduate training at Rice University, and his medical school training at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. After three years of Emergency Medicine Residency training at the University of Chicago, he returned to Baylor as faculty in the Section of Emergency Medicine. He currently serves as the Residency Program Director and Vice Chair for Education for the Department of Emergency Medicine, and the Medical Director for Simulation and Standardized Patient Programs for Baylor College of Medicine. During this time, he also completed a Masters in Education program at the University of Houston. Dr. Pillow’s interests focus on education, including education technology, simulation, standardized patients, feedback and evaluation, and bedside teaching. He has received numerous teaching awards, including the John P. McGovern Teaching Award for the Clinical Sciences (2013, 2017), and the Council of Residency Directors National Faculty Teaching Award (2012). He has also delivered multiple workshops on Education Technology at ACGME annual meeting, AAMC annual meeting, and other national Emergency Medicine academic meetings.

Associate Professor, Vice Chair of Education, Mentor

Stanford School of Medicine - Department of Emergency Medicine

Dr. Michael Gisondi is the inaugural Vice Chair of Education in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University. He is the Principal and Founder of the Precision Education and Assessment Research Lab (The PEARL), Co-Director of the Scholarly Concentration in Medical Education, and the faculty advisor for LGBTQ+ Meds at Stanford School of Medicine. He is a Distinguished Member of the Stanford Medicine Teaching and Mentoring Academy. Dr. Gisondi is a medical education researcher and an expert in the application of social media in medical education. He is a member of the editorial boards of Academic Life in Emergency Medicine, International Clinician Educators Blog, and the Journal of Education and Teaching in Emergency Medicine. He is an associate editor for the textbook, Emergency Medicine, and conference faculty with the national certification course, EPEC-EM: Education in Palliative and End-of-life Care in Emergency Medicine. Dr Gisondi previously served on the Board of Directors for the Council of Residency Directors in Emergency Medicine. Earlier in his career, he served as Residency Program Director, Medical Education Scholarship Fellowship Director (SAEM-approved), and Director of the Feinberg Academy of Medical Educators at Northwestern University. In 2014, Dr. Gisondi was awarded the National Faculty Teaching Award of the American College of Emergency Physicians and was named Alumnus of the Year by Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. He completed the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Chair Development Program and the Stanford Medicine Leadership Academy.

Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine

Emory University School of Medicine

 Dr. Patrick Meloy joined the Emory University School of Medicine faculty in 2013. He serves as Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, and is currently practicing at Emory University and Grady Memorial Hospitals. He earned his bachelor’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and his MD from St. George’s University School of Medicine. He successfully graduated from the Sinai-Grace Hospital/Wayne State University Emergency Medicine residency after serving as chief resident. He is currently a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physician and was named “Teacher of the Year” twice of the Emergency Medicine program at Emory. He has authored several book chapters, and has published multiple clinical and research papers. He currently is the Site Director of the Emergency Medicine Residency at Emory University Hospital Midtown, and is coordinator of the Mock Oral Boards for the residency program. His interests include trauma care, infectious disease preparedness, pediatric emergency care and EKG instruction. He currently lives in Atlanta, GA, with his wife and two daughters.

Emeritus Professor

Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine

Health services researcher in Emergency Medicine, focus on access to care for the underserved and social determinants of health.

Professor-Vice Chair, Associate Dean

Emory University School of Medicine

Sheryl L. Heron, MD, MPH, is a professor and vice-chair of faculty equity, engagement and empowerment in the department of emergency medicine, inaugural associate dean for community engagement, equity and inclusion and associate director of education and training for the injury prevention research center at Emory (IPRCE), Emory University School of Medicine. She is also a past chair of the emergency medicine section of the National Medical Association. Dr. Heron has received numerous awards including the Partnership Against Domestic Violence’s HOPE Award, the Women in Medicine Award from the Council of Concerned Women of the National Medical Association, the Gender Justice Award from the Commission on Family Violence, and was named a Hero of Emergency Medicine by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). She was named the inaugural president of the Academy for Diversity & Inclusion in Emergency Medicine (ADIEM) of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine and is an editor of two textbooks on diversity and inclusion in quality patient care in emergency medicine. Dr. Heron has lectured extensively on topics such as diversity, equity & inclusion as well as wellness and well-being in health care.

Instructor

Jacobi Medical Center/Montefiore Medical Center

Dr. Mitchell is an Emergency Medicine physician in New York City. She obtained her Bachelor’s of Science from Columbia University before attending Keck School of Medicine of USC. Dr. Mitchell completed residency training at the Jacobi-Montefiore Emergency Medicine Program before joining the faculty at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

Formerly Director Of Research

Kaweah Delta Hospital District

Raised in many parts of the country in a profoundly academic family; Dr. Totten studied Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Southern California. After a year at Waseda University in Japan, she added Pre-Med and matriculated to Loyola U School of Medicine in 1975. An internship in Tennessee and two years in the US Public Health Service later, she returned to CA for a family medicine residency in Merced and grandfathered into EM in 1986. For 10 years she worked in small rural (and under-resourced) EDs all around the Central Valley while raising three children alone. After a year in Sweden as an emergency physician, she moved to Brooklyn to start the academic portion of my career. 

Raised in a gender-fluid family, Dr. Totten was co-president of USC's Gay Student Alliance at USC during 1971-2 academic year. she was interested in how language shapes thought, and studied much of the early gay, lesbian, and transgender literature. Her academic work included circadian disruption, teaching methods, and adult learning. Other areas of interest are international development of emergency medicine the specialty; mentoring the young in research methods, and global EM. She is a member of SAEM, ACEP, AAEM, IFEM, and founding member of GEMA. Currently advocating for appropriate medical treatment of transgendered etc persons in Family Medicine and Emergency Medicine, she has partnered with Horizons activist Nicolas Calvo-Rosenstone to educate physicians on the medical needs of non-gender conforming persons. 

After 40 years on the front line, Dr. Totten is retiring from the active practice of clinical medicine and will devote herself to teaching what she is asked to teach, if it is in her repertoire.