Federico Vaca, MD, MPH

Dr. Vaca is Professor and Executive Vice Chair at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine. He began his career at UCI in 1996; in 2009, he moved on to the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine, where he was Professor, Vice Chair for Faculty Affairs, and instrumental in creating the department’s academic appointments and promotion process. In 2022, Dr. Vaca returned to UC Irvine. His career as an academic emergency medicine physician led him along the trajectory of navigating fellowship training programs, development of post-doctoral fellowships, establishment of department-based mentoring programs, establishment of injury science research centers, a visiting scholar appointment at the NIH, and NIH funding since 2007. Having navigated the academic waters in a multitude of domains over several decades, his wide breath of knowledge and experience directly related to the hidden curriculum in faculty development and advancing through the of world academia is highly aligned with the proposed SAEM didactic session. Further, as the didactic session moderator, his experience and insights will intentionally serve to identify and probe unique and more nuanced facet of the hidden curriculum to educate session attendees.