Congratulations to the following faculty members who have received promotions in the division of General Internal Medicine.
It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce several faculty member promotions to Associate Professor and Full Professor. As you know, these academic promotions mark faculty members’ scholarly achievements and are a hallmark of professional accomplishment in our school. Faculty appointed to Associate Professor or Full Professor have achieved recognition within Duke and at peer institutions as leaders in their fields both nationally and/or internationally.
– Dr. L. Ebony Boulware, Chief, Duke Division of General Internal Medicine
NEW ASSOCIATE PROFESSORS
Jennifer Gierisch, PhD
Dr. Gierisch is a behavioral scientist and health services researcher who has established a national and international reputation for her expertise in designing behavioral interventions and conducting rigorous evidence syntheses. She has authored numerous manuscripts, editorials, and book chapters on such topics as adherence to cancer screening and interventions to enhance healthy eating. Her work has garnered national and international attention through publication in high impact journals, such as the Annals of Internal Medicine. She has received numerous grant awards, including a VA HSR&D investigator initiated research (IIR) grant, Adjunctive Mood Management for Telephone-based Smoking Cessation in Primary Care, a 4-year randomized controlled trial to evaluate co-delivered mood management and proactive telephone-delivered smoking cessation with a nicotine replacement telepharmacy clinic. She is also the lead behavioral researcher on the VA Health Services Research and Development Collaborative Research to Enhance and Advance Transformation and Excellence (CREATE) grant, which includes her design of behavioral interventions for three included randomized controlled trials that are a part of this multi-grant mechanism. She is also an active mentor to students, fellows, and faculty.
Dr. Gierisch is also a leader in evidence synthesis and stakeholder engagement. To date, she has conducted over a dozen systematic reviews. In 2014, she was selected as the Associate Director of the Durham VA Evidence-based Synthesis Program. In this capacity, she helps oversee the administrative and research activities of this program and advises other researchers on conduct of evidence synthesis. She is also one of the key investigator in the Duke Evidence Synthesis Group which has conducted high-impact studies for PCORI, ACS, and AHRQ. Dr. Gierisch is leading the effort to establish a patient engagement council at the Durham VA Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care. This council will serve as a mechanism for engaging patients in research. Lastly, Dr. Gierisch serves on a national VA Veteran Engagement Workgroup that is tasked with developing a national plan on how best to integrate patient perspectives into health services research. She now also co-Directs the Community Connections and Collaborations Core for the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Award.
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Sharon Rubin, MD, FACP
Dr. Rubin is a Clinician Educator who has been recognized for her local, regional and national leadership in medical education. She currently serves as Residency Director of the Internal Medicine Resident Clinic at Pickett Road. She has also served teaching roles at Duke Regional Hospital. She has been consistently regarded as an outstanding educator and mentor to residents, interns, and physician assistants. She has received numerous teaching awards for her commitment and excellence to medical education at Duke. She achieve national recognition for her education scholarship, leading major education efforts for mature adults at the national level in recognition of her scholarly achievement as an educator. She has filled leadership roles on for the national American College of Physicians organization, specifically in helping to lead the renowned Multiple Small Feedings of the Mind program—a major cornerstone educational program for the American College of Physicians– and through her service on the national Postgraduate Committee for the American College of Physicians. She is also a recognized leader in the American College of Physicians in North Carolina. In addition to her outstanding education and mentoring efforts at Duke, Dr. Rubin has also served as a mentor to trainee physicians outside of Duke, around the state and nationally.
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NEW FULL PROFESSORS
David Edelman, MD
Dr. Edelman is a researcher, educator, and clinician who has established himself as a leading national and international authority in screening for, and prevention and treatment of, chronic illnesses that lead to cardiovascular disease such as diabetes and hypertension. Through his development of clinical practice recommendations and conduct of funded research, his work has made a major impact on the care of patients with these chronic conditions. He also conducted early studies on screening for diabetes, funded by a prestigious VA Early Career Development award. This work formed the foundation for numerous other government-funded studies of which he has served as Principal Investigator. Since his early career, Dr. Edelman has had a steady stream of major competitive grant funding as Principal Investigator (PI). He has been PI for either NIH R01 or VA Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) R01-equivalent funding since 2005, earning 3 major grants since that time. In addition, he has been the senior investigator on 5 other major project grants since 2010.
Dr. Edelman has conducted seminal studies that have demonstrated the value of diabetes screening, which have been published in leading medical journals, including Journal of General Internal Medicine, Diabetes Care, and Annals of Internal Medicine. His work has contributed to changing screening and treatment guidelines for patients with Diabetes in the United States. He has also established the effectiveness of multi-faceted health service intervention to treat diabetes and hypertension, moving the field forward by delineating both the potential and the limitations of implementation of interventions to improve meaningful chronic disease outcome measures.
Dr. Edelman has also directed the TL1 program for medical student research education under Duke’s CTSA since 2013, and is a Study Program Director for third year medical students on the TL1 as well as those getting an MBA, JD, or Masters in Public Policy.
In addition to these roles, Dr. Edelman plays key administrative leadership roles within the research infrastructure at the Durham VA, including his co-leadership of the IRB since 2009. This critical function facilitates the ethical and smooth conduct of clinical research studies throughout that facility, which is a major and vital component of the Duke collaborative clinical research infrastructure. Since 2002 he has been the co-director of CRTP 242, “Principles of Clinical Research,” which is the core research methodology survey course for the Masters Degree in Clinical Research. In 2009, he was named CRTP’s “Teacher of the Year,” which is awarded based on recommendations from both students and peers, for his outstanding leadership of that program. In addition to this didactic teaching, Dr. Edelman has been a well-regarded clinical teacher of residents in the VA outpatient clinic since 1994.
Dr. Edelman is an extremely successful research mentor, having been the primary mentor for 11 students,fellows, and junior faculty since 2002. Among the 7 of these who were fellows or faculty, 4 have obtained career development awards, 2 have earned major project (R01 equivalent) funding as PI, and 3 have earned small grant (R03 equivalent) funding as PI. He has also co-mentored 5 other faculty and fellows, all of whom continue in academic research careers.
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Larry Greenblatt, MD
Dr. Greenblatt is an internationally recognized clinician educator, and he has been a prominent leader of numerous core educational activities for young physicians in the Duke Department of Medicine. He has developed numerous learning curricula that are employed throughout the educational experiences of Duke Internal Medicine residents and medical students, including the Ambulatory Care Lecture series, a self-directed learning curriculum for Medical Informatics, a series of thirteen clinical practice guidelines used by residents in clinic, and several Evidence Based Medicine learning modules. He has also been instrumental in instituting or leading several key medical education activities at Duke, including his early service as the Assistant Primary Care Program Director (1995-1996), his role as a co-founder of the Medicine/Pediatrics Teaching Clinic (1996), his membership on the Graduate Medical Education Executive Committee (1996-2002), his membership on the Institutional Committee for Graduate Medical Education (2000-2002), as Associate Program Director for Ambulatory Care (2010-2012), and as Faculty and Advisory Committee Member for the Primary Care Leadership Track, a program dedicated to teaching leadership skills to medical students.
Dr. Greenblatt has lectured in numerous settings, including the Internal Medicine Ambulatory Care lecture series, the Internal Medicine Evidence Based Medicine Curriculum series, Outpatient didactic education series, and Internal Medicine Resident Morning Report. He also organized and led the Clinical Teaching Retreat for Duke Medicine Residents from 2005 to 2008) and has served as a leader in 2 faculty development workshops for ambulatory teachers of advanced clinical practice students in 2013. As a resounding endorsement of his skill in teaching learners at all levels, he has been selected to lead the clinical teaching faculty development program for all hospital-based clinical faculty since 2011.
Dr. Greenblatt’s commitment to excellence in educating young physicians extends beyond Duke walls locally, nationally, and internationally. He has been an invited lecturer and facilitator in Clinical Teaching Retreats at the Virginia Commonwealth University and Indiana University. He also serves as a Physician leader for the Pioneer Fellows Clinical Teaching Program, at the Academic Medicine Education Institute, a collaborative effort between Duke-NUS Medical School and Sing Health. In this program, he is serving as a mentor to 38 junior physicians and other health professions faculty, where he trains and mentors these educators in didactic skills and strategies for providing effective faculty development in clinical and classroom settings. Larry’s nomination letters (extended from some of Larry’s students) reflect the influence Larry has had on learners at the student, resident, fellow, and faculty levels.
Dr. Greenblatt also serves as a physician leader for Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), which offers patient-centered care throughout North Carolina to Medicaid patients and others. In this organization he serves as Medical Director of our six county network and also serves on a number of state-wide efforts including the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, The Quality Measures and Feedback Committee, The Palliative Care Initiative, the Chronic Pain Initiative and the Best Practices Committee. This program has been directly responsible for improving quality and access to care for many underserved communities in North Carolina.
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Chad Kessler, MD
Dr. Kessler has a distinguished track record as a clinician educator, researcher and administrative leader who began his early career at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) School of Medicine, where he gained early recognition as an Associate Program Director for the combined Emergency Medicine-Internal Medicine Program prior to coming to North Carolina. While there, he designed and published curricula for residents (Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, OB-GYN and Psychiatry) in Emergency Medicine and mentored numerous medical students and residents.
Since joining the Department of Medicine at Duke in 2012, Dr. Kessler has served as a leader within a number of important medical education initiatives for medical students and residents including his leadership as a steering committee member and inaugural fellow of the Duke Academy for Health Professionals Education and Academic Development (AHEAD) , and his roles on of the Duke University Medical Center Institutional Committee for Graduate Medical Education and the Duke Graduate Medical Education Concentration Advisory Committee. In this role, he serves as a VA liaison to Graduate Medical Education ensuring the quality and assessment of resident physicians at the Durham VA Medical Center. Dr. Kessler works to unite educators across the Duke University campus in multiple disciplines to advance education and medical education research. He serves as a VA liaison to Graduate Medical Education ensuring the quality and assessment of resident physicians at the Durham VA Medical Center.
Dr. Kessler has also established exemplary leadership in the Veterans Affairs Health Care system. Prior to his time at the Durham VA Medical Center, Dr. Kessler served as the Section Chief of Emergency Medicine at Chicago’s Jesse Brown Facility. Currently, he serves as the Deputy Chief of Staff and practicing physician for the Durham VA Medical Center. In this role, he is responsible for the oversight of all clinical operations of the VA Medical Center and its nine sites of care across the state of North Carolina. Dr. Kessler leads the Emergency Department service line, Ambulatory Care, Non-VA Care Coordination, Emergency Management and Clinical Informatics. His current national leadership role is substantial, as he is Chairman for the Veterans Healthcare Administration National Advisory Committee for Emergency Medicine that dictates policy for all VA Emergency Departments across the Nation. In this role, he crafts guidelines and policies for clinical practice in VA Emergency Departments as well as collaborating with other national program offices to provide seamless care to the Veteran.
Dr. Kessler has over 50 publications in the field of medical education and healthcare communications, specifically related to consultations and transitions of care, and curriculum development. Further publications and grants focus on VA Healthcare policy and Emergency Medicine practice. Dr. Kessler is recognized as one of the nation’s leaders in consultation/handoff research within the Emergency Medicine and General Internal medicine communities. His work has garnered publication in leading journals including Academic Medicine and Annals of Emergency Medicine. He has also held multiple leadership posts in national organizations, including the Society of Academic Medicine, and the American College of Emergency Physicians.