People

Vonzella A. Bryant, MD

Melanie Cheng, MD

NYC H+H/Kings County

Dr. Cheng is a pediatric hospitalist and Associate Chief Medical Officer for the GME at SUNY Downstate.

Stacey Frisch, MD, MS-HPEd

NYU Langone Health/Grossman School of Medicine

Stacey Frisch is an Associate Program Director at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine Emergency Medicine Residency Program. She recently graduated from medical education fellowship at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, where she led resident didactic education and the developed a women's professional development program. ​

Previously, Dr. Frisch was a chief resident in Emergency Medicine at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, NY, where she implemented a pregnancy-friendly shift schedule for residents and faculty and developed an equitable parental and sick leave policy.

As a medical educator, Stacey Frisch is passionate about training the next generation of emergency medicine physicians to deliver high quality care to all patients.

Smruti Desai, DO, MPH, MA

Maimonides Medical Center

Dr Smruti Desai is an ED Attending Physician and simulation faculty member at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is focused on using simulation to strategize diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Previously, she was the founder and chair of the first GME DEI council at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, through which she established sustainable social justice, community engagement and URM sponsorship projects. Her work won the ACGME Barbara Ross-Lee DEI Award in 2022 for SUNY Downstate. Her clinical interests include advocacy for vulnerable populations and using community engagement to addressing systemic racism in health care.

Dr. Desai has founded DEI efforts in upstander training and response at Maimonides Medical Center, and has provided talks regionally on the subject, as well as workshops nationally and locally including at SAEM 23.

Mark I. Langdorf, MD, MHPE

University of California, Irvine

Mark I. Langdorf, MD MHPE, FACEP, FAAEM is Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. After medical school at UC San Diego, he did an EM residency, a fellowship in medical education and the Master degree in Health Professions Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He served as Program Director for the emergency medicine residency for 10 years, Medical Director of the Level I Trauma Center Emergency Department for 18 years, and Division Chief and then Department Chair for 20 years. He served as Associate Dean for Faculty Development and CME, and Director of the Academy for Innovation in Medical Education at UC Irvine. He also served as Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education, responsible for the entire medical school teaching program at UC Irvine.

He consults and speaks nationally and internationally to promote optimal trauma, stroke and emergency care. He is former Regional Faculty for the Advanced Cardiac Life Support Course and has taught Advanced Trauma Life Support. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (WestJEM), an open-access peer review international journal, at www.westjem.com. This journal is the 5th ranked general emergency medicine journal in the world, with an Impact Factor of 3.908.

He is the recipient of the Peter Rosen (renamed the Robert McNamara) Award for Academic Leadership from the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM). http://www.aaem.org/about-aaem/awards/prev-award-winners . He received the national Joe Lex Educator of the Year award from AAEM in 2023, and was awarded the Master of AAEM designation for outstanding service, scholarship, and advocacy to AAEM. https://www.aaem.org/about-us/our-values/awards/award-recipients (one recipient each year nationally). He served as Medical Staff Officer for 8 years, including President from 2019-21, and Immediate Past President (2021-23) of the Medical Staff (some 1400 physicians) at UC Irvine Medical Center.

David Sklar, MD

Danya Khoujah, MBBS, MEHP

Emergency Physician

Danya Khoujah, MBBS, MEHP, is an emergency physician and medical educator with an academic focus on geriatric emergency care and emergency neurology. She splits her clinical time between Florida and the Middle East, and is part of the writing group of the Geriatric Emergency Department Guidelines 2.0, namely the Delirium and Medication Safety sections. She also serves as teaching faculty and webinar host at the Geriatric ED Collaborative.

Stephen R. Hayden, MD

Richelle J. Cooper, MD, MSHS

David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine

Dr. Cooper is Professor of Emergency Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine, and VIce Chair of Research for the UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine, at the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center. Dr Cooper has been one of the methodology and statistics editors at Annals of Emergency Medicine since 2000, and is Executive Deputy Editor of Annals of Emergency Medicine. She has conducted research on, and lectured on multiple topics related to peer-review. Her research interests include the science of peer review and methodology, gender and healthcare disparities, social emergency medicine, and overuse and low value care. She serves on the American College of Emergency Physicians Research Committee.

Martin P. Wegman , MD, PhD, FACEP

Research Director

HCA Florida Orange Park Hospital

Martin Wegman, MD, PhD is a practicing emergency physician, population-health scientist, and research director at HCA FL Orange Park Hospital. He is also the inaugural Senior Research Fellow at the American College of Emergency Physicians where he provides strategic direction for the College's research portfolio, including the annual research conference, research training course and research networks. In these roles, he serves as principal investigator on multiple funded projects. 

He completed his MD-PhD training program at the University of Florida, with graduate work in epidemiology and healthcare policy. He then completed a post-graduate clinical research fellowship at Yale School of Medicine and his emergency medicine residency training at Yale and the University of North Carolina. He has been published in Lancet Global Health, JAMA, Health Affairs, and Medical Care, and funded by the NIH, FDA, Doris Duke Foundation, and the AMA - with awards totaling in excess of $1M. He has expertise in research methodology, including quasi-experimental design and experience in analyzing large healthcare datasets to inform healthcare practice and policy.

Elspeth K. Pearce, MD

Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine

University of Kansas Medical Center

Elspeth Pearce, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She graduated from the University of Kansas School of Medicine and trained in Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Dr. Pearce is the associate program director and director of simulation for the emergency medicine residency program. She also has a faculty appointment in the School of Medicine, in conjunction with the Zamierowski Institute for Experiential Learning, preparing and delivering longitudinal simulation curriculum for medical students. She has an interest in multimodal medical education, gamification, psychological safety in medical education, feedback, and coaching. Other interests include LGBTQ+ health disparities and reducing bias in medical education.

Andrew C. Meltzer, MD, MS

George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences

Andrew C. Meltzer, MD MS FACEP is a Professor of Emergency Medicine and the Chief of the Clinical Research Section at the George Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Meltzer completed his MD at SUNY Downstate, residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Maryland and R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, and his fellowship in Clinical Research at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and member of the ACEP Clinical Policies Committee and the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) Research Committee. He was an author of the GRACE-2 Guidelines for Abdominal Pan and served as a member of the External Oversight Board for the SIREN research network. As part of an international team, he developed guidelines for the acute management of gastrointestinal bleeding. He was the principal investigator on the NIH-funded multi-center randomized control trial on medical expulsive therapy for renal colic. In addition, he was the PI on a multi-center trial examining novel way to diagnose gastrointestinal hemorrhage, the site PI on the CDC Recover grant, and the overall PI for the HYPERACT trial examining acute management of patients with respiratory distress. He has experience working with two successful technology companies as a chief medical officer. As of this writing, Dr. Meltzer had over 60 peer-reviewed authorships indexed in PubMed with over 1500 citations.

Todd Clark, MD, MBA

Gretchen Fuller, MD, FACEP, FACH

UT Austin Dell Medical School

Gretchen Fuller, MD, FACEP, FACH is a dual-boarded Emergency Medicine and Pediatric Emergency Medicine physician. Gretchen completed medical school at Harvard University, Emergency Medicine residency and Chief Residency at University of California, San Francisco and Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship at University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery at University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School and teaches communication skills across the undergraduate, medical student, resident, fellow, faculty continuum. She was the recipient of the 2024 Dell Medical School Compassion and Character Faculty Award and several Dell Medical School Graduate Medical Education Clinical Learning Environment Awards. Her professional focus is interpersonal and team communication and how these skills can foster human connection and improve the lives of healthcare professionals and patients.

She is a member of the Faculty and Board of Directors of the Academy of Communication in Healthcare and facilitates workshops locally, nationally and internationally on individual and team communication skills, conflict, inclusion, coaching, feedback and leading teams. Gretchen is a certified Physician Development Coach through the International Coaching Federation-accredited Physician Coaching Institute. She previously served as National Director of Patient Experience for US Acute Care Solutions, an acute care contracting company with over 5,000 clinicians caring for over 9 million patients annually. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and 3 children.

Lauren Evans, MD

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

Lauren Evans, MD is currently an Assistant Professor and the Residency Program Director at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). She graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine and completed her Emergency Medicine residency at UAMS. She has previously held both the APD and Clerkship Director positions at UAMS before transitioning into the Program Director position. Her interests include mentorship, resident remediation, curriculum design, and advising EM bound students. She is an active member of the Council of Residency Directors (CORD), the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), holding leadership positions and serving on various committees.

David E. Manthey, MD