Melanie Barlow is a Registered Nurse with a Master’s in Intensive Care Nursing and is currently completing postgraduate qualifications in Education, Leadership and Management. She is currently the Education Programs Manager at Mater Education, with 10 years’ experience in the delivery of interprofessional simulation education. Melanie is currently an Executive Committee member for the Australian Society for Simulation in Healthcare (ASSH) and a member of the Queensland Simulation Advisory Committee.

William “Bill” Berry, MD, MPA, MPH, FACS, is chief medical officer at Ariadne Labs. In this role, Bill oversees the growth and development for all the research work including the Program teams: Safe Surgery, BetterBirth and Serious Illness Care, as well as the Platform teams: Informatics and Measurement, Implementation and Improvement Science, and Program Management. In addition, Bill serves as the Director of the Safe Surgery Program and oversees the specific research and execution of the program.

Dr. Berry is also a surgical consultant to the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions and serves as the Boston Program Director of the “Safe Surgery Saves Lives” initiative with the World Health Organization’s Patient Safety Program. For the last eight years, Dr. Berry has served as a faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in collaborative projects focused on improving the safety of surgical patients. He holds an appointment as a research fellow in the Department of Anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital and as a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Berry has taught clinical process improvement extensively for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and serves on the Workforce on Patient Safety for the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. Since 2003, Dr. Berry has been a member of the faculty at the Center for Medical Simulation, where he performs clinical research in the area of improving surgical safety using simulation and researched and designed scenarios, particularly for surgeons and surgical teams.

Dr. Berry attended Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has achieved board certification in General Surgery, Thoracic Surgery and Surgical Critical Care. After 17 years in practice as a cardiac surgeon, he earned his MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government and his MPH from Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Rick Blum is a pediatric anesthesiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. He attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine followed by an internship in Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine/Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center and by fellowships in Pediatric Cardiac and General Pediatric Anesthesia at Tufts-New England Medical Center/Boston Floating Hospital for Infants & Children and Adult & Pediatric Cardiac Anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Blum is the Principal Investigator of a research study, Assessing the Performance of First Year Anesthesia Residents to Ensure Basic Competence, which has been funded by a grant from the Harvard School of Medicine’s Department of Anesthesia, the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation and The Cathedral Fund. The long-term goal of this project is to have an effective, objective, credible, ongoing process for evaluation of anesthesia residents’ clinical competencies, ensuring that no resident graduates from any program not meeting the levels of performance that are sufficient to ensure an acceptable level of patient safety.

The research team is utilizing medical simulation to evaluate residents on performance; the program will attempt to identify anesthesia residents in need of remediation early in their training programs. They have created a set of standards and criteria to test the competency of Harvard-affiliated anesthesia residents and teach them to practice safer medicine, reducing medical mistakes as well as patient complication and death. They foresee developing standards and criteria that can be adapted to each medical specialty to enhance patient safety on a large scale; they believe this education will increase overall patient safety among anesthesia residents nationwide.

Timothy Brake is a simulationist in Hong Kong, working as an anesthesiologist and pain medicine specialist in the United Christian Hospital, Hong Kong. Tim was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Medical Simulation in April and May 2015. He has attended the IMS course in December 2013 and been assistant faculty for IMS courses run in Hong Kong. He is the Course Director for Effective Management of Anesthetic Emergencies and the Hong Kong Simulation Instructor Course. He instructs on ACLS, Advanced Difficult Airway Management, Crew Resource Management.

His research interests include the cultural differences in simulation-based medical education and debriefing. He is a faculty member for the Center for Medical Simulation.

Gary J. Brenner, MD, PhD, currently sees patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital Pain Center, where he is the Director of the MGH Pain Medicine Fellowship. He is an Assistant Professor in Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. He also conducts neuroscience research that investigates mechanisms of pain hypersensitivity. He has authored more than 30 articles, reviews, chapters and abstracts on the pathophysiology of pain, basic pain mechanisms and immune function, and clinical approaches to chronic pain. Dr. Brenner currently has several national leadership positions related to pain medicine education/training.

John Carroll is the Gordon Kaufman Professor of Management, a Professor of Organization Studies and Engineering Systems and Co-Director of the Lean Advancement Initiative at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Carroll is an excellent source for information on individual and group decision making, with a focus on its relationship to organizational learning and change practices such as self-assessment and root cause analysis. His recent work focuses on industries that manage significant hazards, such as nuclear power, petrochemicals and healthcare.

He has examined the relationships among leadership, management philosophies, teamwork, mental models, safety culture and human performance improvement. Carroll holds a BS in physics from MIT, as well as an MA and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University.

Jeffrey B. Cooper, PhD, is the founder and Executive Director emeritus of the Center for Medical Simulation, which is dedicated to the use of simulation in healthcare as a means to improve the process of education and training and to avoid risk to patients. He is also Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. He received his BS in Chemical Engineering and MS in Biomedical Engineering from Drexel University in 1968 and 1970 respectively and completed a PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Missouri in 1972.

Starting soon thereafter with the Bioengineering Unit in the Department of Anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), he led the team that conducted seminal studies of critical incidents and human error in anesthesia. During the same time, he was leading a team that developed one of the first microprocessor-based medical technologies, the Boston Anesthesia System, aimed at integrating functions for the ultimate purpose of reducing human and system errors. Both of these efforts have catalyzed changes in anesthesia practice in the ensuing years.

In April, 2009, Dr. Cooper retired as Director of Biomedical Engineering for the Partners HealthCare System Inc., a technology development and service department that he organized and led for 15 years. Dr. Cooper was a lead member of the group that created the first safety-related standards for anesthesia, equivalent versions of which have since been adopted in the U.S. and throughout the world. He is a co-founder of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF), serving continuously on its Executive Committee and for 13 years as Chairman of its Committee on Scientific Evaluation.

He is now an APSF Executive Vice President. He serves on the Board of Governors of the National Patient Safety Foundation and founded its Research Program, which he chaired for seven years. Dr. Cooper is one of the pioneers in diffusion and innovation in healthcare simulation. He has led CMS to become one of the premier simulation programs in the world. Among the more innovative programs he has created or co-developed are the Institute for Medical Simulation, live, interactive simulation video-teleconferencing and the novel Healthcare Adventures (a program for training healthcare administrators and leaders in teamwork via realistic simulation). He has mentored the faculty of CMS since its inception and has stimulated, participated in and advised on various research projects.

Dr. Cooper has been awarded several honors for his work in patient safety, including the 2003 John M. Eisenberg Award for Lifetime Achievement in Patient Safety from the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Clinical Engineering. The Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care of the MGH recently established the Jeffrey B. Cooper Patient Safety award in his honor.

Fred G. Davis, MD, is an Emeritus Staff Anesthesiologist at Lahey Clinic. Dr. Davis graduated from Drexel University College of Medicine in 1966 and has been in practice for 49 years. He completed a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. He practiced at Lahey Hitchcock Medical Center Anesthesiology and was affiliated with Lahey Hospital & Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Ignacio del Moral is a specialist in Anesthesiology and has his doctorate from Cantabria University, Spain. He worked for 15 years at Valdecilla University Hospital in Santander in the Trauma area. In 1997 he began working in the simulation field designing programs for Crisis Resource Management. He is presently the Executive Director at Hospital virtual Valdecilla. He received a research fellowship in simulation (2009-2010) from the Institute for Medical Simulation and Harvard Medical School.

Founding President of the Spanish Society for Simulation in Healthcare, he is committed to improving patient safety and clinical education using simulation. To advance these goals, he advises simulation leaders in Spanish-speaking countries with strategic management, leadership development and institution building for their simulation programs.

Walter Eppich is the Director of Faculty Development in the Department of Medical Education at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, where he is also an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Medical Education. His clinical home is the Division of Emergency Medicine at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. He has been a co-investigator on multiple simulation-related research grants. Nationally and internationally, he has taught extensively on many basic and advanced simulation educator courses and has been an invited speaker on topics related to simulation and debriefing around the world.

Since April 2014 he is a candidate for a PhD in Medical Education at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. His research interests involve all things debriefing as well as the intersection between workplace- and simulation-based learning. He served as an at large member of the SSH Board of Directors from 2012-2014. He has been a faculty member for the Center for Medical Simulation since 2010.

Tobias Everett, MD, is a pediatric anesthesiologist at the The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Anesthesia, and is on the faculty of the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston. Dr. Everett was recruited to the Hospital for Sick Children in 2012 as a clinician-educator. He is a British-trained pediatric anesthesiologist and fellow by examination of the Royal College of Anaesthetists (UK), with subspecialty certification in regional anesthesia from the European Society of Regional Anaesthesia. His master of science in clinical trials is from University of London.

He leads the Simulation Program for the University of Toronto Department of Anesthesia and is the Director of Simulation for the SickKids Department of Anesthesia. He has overseen the international expansion of the Managing Emergencies in Pediatric Anesthesia (MEPA) simulation course such that the standardized curriculum is available in multiple centers on five continents. His academic interests include simulation-based medical education and medical education research with a specific interest in interprofessional team debriefing and simulation-based assessments.

He is the principal investigator in international education research studies and has received grant funding from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society. He sits on the Board of Directors of the International Pediatric Simulation Society and was 2015 chair of the society’s annual scientific meeting. Dr. Everett has worked with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, as faculty on their National Simulation Education and Training program, as the Toronto representative on the Canadian National Anesthesia Simulation Curriculum and member of the organizing committee for the annual Royal College Simulation Summit. Dr. Everett has received international awards for his work in simulation-based medical education and multiple awards for his various teaching activities within anesthesia and beyond.

Dr. David Feinstein received his BA in Biochemistry from Harvard University in 1979. In 1983 he graduated from Tulane University with an MS in Biomedical Engineering. He then went on to Dartmouth Medical School where he graduated in 1987. He did his Preliminary Medicine Internship at the Miriam Hospital in Providence, R.I., and from there entered the Anesthesia Residency Program at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.

David was appointed Chief Resident for his final half year of residency. During that CA-3 year, his clinical work concentrated on cardiac anesthesia at the Beth Israel Hospital, and he conducted research in physiologic modeling at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In 1991, David joined the hospital as a Staff Anesthesiologist and as an Instructor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. He is currently Director of Information Technology and Simulator Training in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and has special interests in simulation training, airway management, safety training and technology assessment.

Dr. Feinstein was an invited member of the original Harvard Simulation Task Force, which formed in 1991 to investigate the possibility of using human patient simulators for medical education at Harvard. He helped design both the first and the current simulation facilities and, through his 14-year involvement, has played a significant role in the development and implementation of simulator-based curriculum at the Center for Medical Simulation. He has contributed significantly in the creation and teaching of the Clinical Anesthesia first-year curriculum, Anesthesia Crisis Resource Management (ACRM) I, II and Faculty, ACRM Instructor Course, Anesthesia for Amateur Course and Tele-Simulation programs. He has also participated in many other CMS projects including those with Harvard Medical School and hospital-based Mock Codes.

One of David’s interests is the advancement of simulation realism and, from its inception, he has helped modify the patient mannequin and simulation environment to enhance the simulation experience. He also has an interest in employing simulation for medical technology development and training and has participated in a number of studies in this area. As Director of Information Technology in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical at BIDMC, Dr. Feinstein has led the development team for a data-driven department intranet site and various web applications that are currently used for sharing crucial department information among members. He also is the Anesthesia Department’s Project Manager for the new Anesthesia Information Management (AIM) system recently configured and deployed at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

As a Senior Rabkin Fellow at the Institute, Dr. Feinstein continued his work at the Center for Medical Simulation and designed a simulation-based research protocol to examine the competency of end users of the AIM system. Dr. Feinstein remains highly involved in simulation and medical technology at BIDMC and on a national level. He was recently appointed Co-Director of the Simulation and Skills Center of the BIDMC. He has been elected to the Board of Overseers and Board of Directors for the Society for Medical Simulation. He also sits on the Board of Directors of the Society for Technology in Anesthesia. In addition, Dr. Feinstein remains active in advising and teaching residents and staff in both inpatient and outpatient settings.

Pacey Foster is an Assistant Professor of Management and Marketing at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Before completing his PhD in Organization Studies at Boston College, he was Associate Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Prior to joining the Program on Negotiation, he worked in private alternative dispute resolution organizations like Endispute and the American Arbitration Association, where he delivered training programs for lawyers, judges and senior executives, and helped to mediate complex public disputes.

Pacey has received several awards for his teaching, including the Donald White Teaching Award at Boston College and the Betty Diener Graduate Teaching Award at UMass-Boston. His research focuses on the development of pedagogy for reflective practice as well as the operation of social networks in creative industries.

Greg Ginsburg, MD, is an anesthesiologist in the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine.

James A. Gordon, MD, MPA, is Director of the Gilbert Program in Medical Simulation at Harvard Medical School, where he is an Associate Professor of Medicine and a Scholar in the Academy of medical educators. He is Chief of the Division of Medical Simulation in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he also leads the hospital-wide Learning Laboratory initiative. Dr. Gordon co-founded the Institute for Medical Simulation at the Center for Medical Simulation in Cambridge, Mass.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in intellectual history at Princeton, Dr. Gordon attended medical school at the University of Virginia and completed his training in emergency medicine at the University of Michigan. Following residency he completed a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, also receiving a master’s degree in public administration.

Dr. Gordon served as principal investigator and national co-chair of the first federally funded research consensus conference on simulation in healthcare. He was a founding board member of the international Society for Simulation in Healthcare, and sits on the editorial board of the inaugural journal in the field, Simulation in Healthcare. Dr. Gordon has received both Investigator and Special Contribution Awards from the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, and served as a Morgan-Zinsser Teaching Fellow at Harvard Medical School. His work has been featured in The New Yorker magazine and highlighted as medical news in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Maureen Hemingway has more than 30 years of experience in perioperative nursing. She is currently the Clinical Nurse Specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She received her BS in Nursing from University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and her Master’s in Health Administration from St. Joseph’s College in Maine. She has experience caring for surgical patients and has held leadership positions within perioperative nursing. She has been working in collaboration with the Center for Medical Simulation for several years.

Brinda Kamdar, MD, is an anesthesiologist in the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine.

Michaela Kolbe, PhD (Psychology), presently works at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, where she is a Senior Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Management, Technology and Economics. Dr. Kolbe leads Research and Development at the Simulation Center of the University Hospital Zurich. She is Privatdozentin at ETH Zürich, a lecturer for various team, safety and method-related topics at several universities, and a simulation educator for clinicians. Her current research interests include the dynamics and promotion of “speaking up,” after-action reviews in the clinical setting and advanced debriefing techniques for simulation-based team trainings.

Kolbe also works as a systemic family therapist and holds a PhD in psychology. She completed a year-long Simulation Fellowship at the Center for Medical Simulation in 2012. She is also a faculty member at CMS.

Pauline Lyon, a Midwife and Advanced Practice Nurse, is the Simulation Education Coordinator for Mater Health Services. Her experiences in simulation include the design, implementation and coordination of both faculty and participant education programs for clinicians across Queensland. In her current role she supports clinicians to improve the safety and quality of patient care through the implementation of simulation-based reviews and education activities across the Mater campus.

José M. Maestre received his Doctorate in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Cantabria, Spain. He is an Attending Physician in the Division of OB/GYN and Pediatric Anesthesia at Valdecilla University Hospital. He serves as Education Director at Valdecilla virtual Hospital, a simulation center in Santander, Spain. He is a Harvard Macy Scholar and Director of the Spanish Simulation Instructor Courses at the Center for Medical Simulation.

He is member of the Faculty Development Committee of the Consortium of American College of Surgeons’ Accredited Education Institutes and member of the Clinical Simulation Working Party of the Anesthesia and Critical Care Spanish Society. He is especially interested in faculty development and simulation as a tool to facilitate organizational change.

Dr. Minehart is Assistant Program Director, Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine (DACCPM) Anesthesia Residency Program, as well as Program Director of the Obstetric Anesthesia Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, and has been a faculty member since August 2007.

Brad Morrison is Associate Professor, Brandeis International Business School, and a Senior Lecturer, MIT Engineering Systems Division. He is currently in the faculty development program at the Institute for Medical Simulation.

A scholar in organizational theory and system dynamics, he studies problems that are rooted in the interactions between human behavior and the “physics” of the systems in which we work, such as operating rooms, emergency departments and factory shop floors. He holds a PhD in Management (System Dynamics and Organization Studies) from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and an MBA (Finance) from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Ann Mullen, MSN, RN, is the Program Manager of the Shipley Medical Simulation Center at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts. She is responsible for program planning, faculty training and ongoing faculty development at NWH. She has over 30 years of experience in critical care nursing and staff education.

She received a Master of Science in Nursing at Regis College and is a certified clinical nurse specialist. She is a graduate of the Institute for Medical Simulation Comprehensive course and the IMS Graduate Program, and is a co-facilitator for the Center for Medical Simulation. Her interests include faculty development, debriefing and simulation safety.

Sacha Muller-Botti MD is a specialist in Anesthesiology, originally from Chile. Currently he is a Staff Specialist and Supervisor of Training in Anaesthesiology at John Hunter Hospital, Newcastle, Australia. He is a conjoint lecturer for the Faculty of Medicine, University of Newcastle, and he is an instructor and part of the faculty of Hunter New England Simulation Centre, Newcastle, Australia. He is also on the faculty of the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston.

Brenda Natal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine (EM) and Director of Simulation at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. She completed her EM Residency and MPH at SUNY Downstate and Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she developed the first Simulation Fellowship under the Department of EM. Dr. Natal then continued to serve as the first fellow. She has a nursing background and recently completed a Clinical Quality Fellowship Program.

In her current role at Rutgers, Dr. Natal develops, coordinates and facilitates simulation curricula at the UME and GME level. She is also leading the efforts to develop a simulation center and simulation educators. She hopes to start a second, more robust Fellowship in Simulation, Education & Health Care Quality at her new institution. She is a Co-Facilitator at the Center for Medical Simulation.

Grace Ng is currently the Associate Nursing Director at the New York Simulation Center for the Health Sciences in New York City. She has served as the Staff Development Nurse Educator for obstetrics at NYU Langone Medical Center and is also a TeamSTEPPS master trainer.

Grace obtained both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia University, and her Advanced Certificate in Nursing Education, with a focus on Simulation, at Hunter College at the City University of New York (CUNY), where she is currently pursuing her PhD in Nursing, focusing on Interprofessional Collaborative Practice. She is a faculty member at the Center for Medical Simulation.

Rachel Onello, PhD, RN, CHSE, CNE, CNL, is an Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Clinical Simulation Laboratory at the University of South Carolina College of Nursing in Columbia, SC. She has taught in simulation-based education since 2008 and has experience in designing, integrating and evaluating simulation in healthcare education. She came to the University of South Carolina from the University of Maryland, where she was the assistant director of the simulation lab and taught clinical and simulation courses to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Dr. Onello’s main area of interest is in faculty development, particularly around simulation design integration and debriefing, not just in simulation-based encounters but also facilitating debriefing style feedback conversations in clinical learning environments.

Dr. Onello received training on simulation and debriefing at the Center for Medical Simulation and from the Peter M. Winter Institute for Simulation, Education and Research at the University of Pittsburgh. She serves on the Education Committee for the Society for Simulation in Healthcare and on the Standardized Patient Standard Subcommittee for the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning.

Guillermo Ortiz, MD, is a Physician in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Director of the program for Internal and Pulmonary Medicine at Bosque University, Bogotá, Colombia. He is also the Director of the Critical Care Department at Santa Clara Hospital in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as the Executive Director of INSIMED (Instituto de Simulacion Clinica). Dr. Ortiz is one of the world’s leading experts in the identification and management of sepsis. He completed a year-long Simulation Fellowship at the Center for Medical Simulation. He is on the faculty of the Center for Medical Simulation.

John Pawlowski is the clinical director of Thoracic Anesthesia at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He directs the anesthetic care of approximately 1,500 cases per year by the Division of Thoracic Surgery and Interventional Pulmonology. He has used medical simulation in the teaching of medical students, residents and faculty since 1993. Since 2010, Dr. Pawlowski has been co-director of the Shapiro Simulation and Skills Center at BIDMC.

He is a co-director of the Pharmacology course at Harvard Medical School. He has published and presented at local and national meetings, conducted workshops and participated in numerous telesimulations. John sits on the Education Committee and the MOCA Endorsed Center Committee of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. He is a Past President of the Society for Technology in Anesthesia.

Roy Phitayakorn, MD, MHPE (MEd), FACS, has a clinical practice in general and endocrine surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is also the Director of Surgical Education Research at MGH and the Surgical Lead for Strategic Initiatives and Operations at the MGH Learning Laboratory.

Dr. Phitayakorn also has a master’s degree in Medical Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago (MHPE). Finally, Dr. Phitayakorn is an external consultant for the American Board of Surgery and a faculty member for several national medical education courses and institutions, including the Harvard Macy Institute, the ACS Surgeons as Educators course and the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston.

Dr. Pian-Smith’s clinical specialty is obstetric anesthesia. Much of her clinical work and investigation centers on improving the healthcare of women, but within that realm projects have spanned a wide spectrum from studying markers of endothelial dysfunction in pre-eclamptics to the role of alternative therapies for the management of menopausal symptoms.

• In addition to enjoying the fruits of direct patient care, her work at Harvard Medical School has provided wonderful opportunities to help shape the future of our specialty through innovations in education, including:\
• Developing techniques to engage the adult learner
• Promoting deliberate practice and personal reflection in medical training
• Using simulation to create controlled and experiential learning opportunities
• Promotion of patient safety practices through improved communication and interdisciplinary collaboration
• A leadership role in the recruitment of our trainees, with the goal of enhancing an extraordinary, talented and diverse community
• Tangible ways to contribute to the support, development and retention of talented and diverse faculty in the Harvard Medical
• School community at large

Advisor Disaster Site Medical Command Cl Assoc Prof Suresh Pillai, MBBS (Singapore), FRCS Ed (A&E), PBM, is a Senior Consultant in the Emergency Medicine Department of National University Hospital. After his basic MBBS qualifications from the National University of Singapore, he obtained his Fellowship from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in Accident & Emergency Medicine. He was awarded a Health Manpower Development Plan Award from MOH for a Fellowship in Toxicology at the San Francisco Poison Control Center in 1999. He was also awarded the Public Service Medal (PBM) at the 2005 National Day Awards for his efforts in organizing and spearheading humanitarian medical relief missions to Indonesia and Sri Lanka during the catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Associate Professor Suresh’s passion and strengths lie in teaching medical students at the undergraduate level, medical trainees at the post-graduate Basic Specialist Trainee (BST) and the Advanced Specialist (AST) levels, and nursing students at the Basic and Advance Diploma Level. Suresh is also actively involved in preparing local and overseas candidates for the MRCS / MMed (A&E) and now the MCEM exams, for which he also serves as an examiner and core faculty. He is also an examiner for the Emergency Medicine Exit Examinations for Advanced Specialist Trainees.

His teaching abilities have garnered him several awards, including the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2007 and the Medical Society Teacher’s Day Award in 2008; he was also voted one of the top 10 tutors in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine in 2009. He was the Departmental Director in Undergraduate Emergency Medical Education and was responsible for organizing the widely popular undergraduate curriculum in Emergency Medicine at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. Under his stewardship, the Emergency Medicine Posting has consistently emerged as one of the top three undergraduate disciplines as voted by medical students. He is currently actively involved in the review of the medical undergraduate curriculum and simulation training at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

He is also involved actively in Life Support Training both at NUH and NUS and is the Basic Cardiac Life Support (BCLS) Course Director for both institutions. He is also an instructor for the Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) and Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLC) Courses. His other areas of active involvement include Disaster Preparation and Readiness both at the hospital, national and international levels. He is the Disaster Coordinator for the Emergency Department at NUH and has also served several terms as Deputy Commander of the Disaster Site Medical Command HQ of MOH that is responsible for coordinating medical teams at the site of any civil emergency or disaster in Singapore. He is a lecturer and trainer at the HazMat Medical Life Support Course conducted by MOH at the Institute of Medical Simulation and Education.

He has also coordinated the development of the NUHS Humanitarian Medical Relief Volunteer Programme. He has also been seconded to the Ministry of Health as Project Consultant and has developed national medical response plans for radiation emergencies in Singapore. He served as Chairman of the Medical Services Subcommittee of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Meetings in Singapore in 2008-2009, helping to organize medical support for local and foreign delegates including ministers and heads of state during the APEC Conferences.

He has also been appointed Deputy Chairman of the Medical Services Subcommittee for the inaugural Youth Olympic Games in Singapore in 2010. He also served as a committee member of the World Association of Disaster and Emergency Medicine’s Committee on Education and Training in Disaster Medicine. Associate Professor Suresh has also co-authored several chapters in the “Guide to Essentials in Medicine” (McGraw Hill Publishers).

Dr. Rock is an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Dr. Rock received a BA from Carleton College and an MD from the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. She completed residency at Stanford University and a fellowship at Boston Medical Center.

Dr. Rock’s professional activities include attending in the Medical Intensive Care Unit, teaching and communication education research. As the Director of the Simulation Core Faculty in the Department of Medicine, she designs and teaches numerous courses for learners ranging from students to faculty, including: communication with family of critically ill patients, interprofessional code leadership and team training, “rapid response training,” individual training in clinical decision making and communication, central line insertion and pulmonary procedures.

She is a co-investigator and faculty director for a simulation-based course to teach residents leadership and communication skills for family meetings in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU). The course, and related research project, emphasizes strategies to improve empathic behaviors and a patient-centered approach. She was selected as the 2011-2012 Putnam Scholar, a scholarship of the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare.

Dr. Rock is active in Harvard Medical School courses as a tutorial leader and preceptor as well as integrating simulation into preclinical pathophysiology courses. She received the Harvard Medical School Excellence in Tutoring Award in 2009, an honor granted by students’ evaluations. Other responsibilities include teaching medicine house staff and critical care fellows in the medical intensive care unit. Dr. Rock has several educational interests, including the use of high-fidelity simulation and providing feedback with an emphasis on curiosity and respect in the simulation and clinical setting. Dr. Rock’s clinical practice involves serving as the attending physician in the MICU. She is also a faculty member for the Center for Medical Simulation.

Rodrigo Rubio, MD, is an anesthesiologist from Mexico City. He is director of the simulation program of the anesthesia department at the American British Cowdray Medical Center. He is also simulation education director at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) where he is responsible for faculty development, academic program development and establishing relations with other simulation centers around the world.

Rodrigo completed a simulation fellowship at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. Rodrigo has an interest in the role of realism in simulation and conducts research on this topic. As an accomplished magician, he uses insights and techniques from this area to help instructors create innovative simulation scenarios. He is a co-facilitator for the Center for Medical Simulation.

Michael Sales, EdD, is a skilled coach, program designer, teacher and facilitator who combines a detailed knowledge of personal, group and organizational change technologies with a broad background in business, entrepreneurship and education. Michael has extensive knowledge of the challenges of participatory management, the introduction of technologies into organizations, and the dynamics of life in family-owned businesses. He has helped many individuals, teams and organizations achieve their objectives. His expertise: the mobilization of energy and talent in support of results.
Michael’s doctoral work at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (supervised by Chris Argyris) focused on the interpersonal skills required by participative management. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a master’s in Broadcast Communication Arts (California State, San Francisco), which explored institutional resistance to new technologies. Michael also has a training certificate from the National Training Laboratory and from Global Foresight Associates, where he was trained in scenario construction.

He has served for 20 years as a senior associate of Barry Oshry’s Power and System Training, the developers of the Organization Workshop as well as the Power and Leadership Conference. Michael was a founding principal of New Context Consulting, providing customized experiential education for organizational learning and change.

Jenni Sokol, MBBS, MHPE, is a physician in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Children’s Hospital and with the Paediatric, Infant and Perinatal Emergency Retrieval Service (PIPER) at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Victoria, Australia. Dr. Sokol was trained in Neonatal and Paediatric Intensive Care at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, and Great Ormond Street in London. She began educating health professionals after commencing work as a Neonatal Consultant in Perth in 2001 and has since completed degrees in both Health Professional Education and Simulation.

Dr. Sokol is a graduate of the IMS “Simulation as an Educational Tool” and the graduate program, and has a Master’s in Health Professional Education. Jenni specializes in interprofessional simulation-based education, facilitating both in-situ and simulation centre-based simulation focusing on teams improving patient safety and management of the deteriorating patient. She is a co-facilitator for the Center for Medical Simulation.

Dr. Sugantha Sundar is a cardiac anesthesiologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She is the Director of the Adult Cardiothoracic Anesthesia Fellowship, an ACGME approved fellowship. Dr. Sundar completed her medical school training in Chennai, India. She subsequently trained and board certified as an Obstetrician and Gynecologist in the UK. Dr. Sundar joined BIDMC as an anesthesia resident in 2000 and completed a cardiac anesthesia fellowship. She was chief resident and earned the Medical Student Teacher of the Year Award.

Her interest in teaching and educating residents won her the Leonard Bushnell Award for Innovations in Teaching in her department. She has developed a simulator-based curriculum in cardiac anesthesia as part of the Rabkin Fellowship. Some of her research interests include genomic variations and their impact on the cardiac surgical patient, impact of low tidal volume ventilation in cardiac surgical patients, and impact of age of red cell in the cardiac surgical patient. Dr. Sundar also serves as the Resource Faculty for her department and is a core faculty member of the Simulation and Skills Center at BIDMC.

Julian Van Dijk has a Bachelor of Applied Science (Nursing) from RMIT University and is currently completing a Master’s in Health Professional Education at Monash University, Melbourne. He is the current Simulation Coordinator at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, and is responsible for operations, program and faculty development. Julian has extensive experience in using simulation across nursing, medicine and allied health disciplines.

His primary research interests are instructor teaching practices, debriefing and the integration of simulation into health education curriculum. Julian is the current scientific convener for SimHealth 2012 and is a current executive member of the Australian Society for Simulation.

Dr. Susan Vassallo, MD, is a board certified anesthesiologist affiliated with Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Vassallo graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1985 and has been in practice for 30 years. She completed a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Jay W. Vogt is an organizational and human development consultant with over 30 years of experience working with government, nonprofit organizations, corporations and small businesses. In 1982, he founded Peoplesworth, a private practice in consulting, training and counseling. He holds a master’s degree in counseling from Antioch University New England and a BA from Hampshire College.

Jay is an accomplished facilitator, mediator, trainer, management consultant and coach. He is a master at facilitating large groups, having led hundreds of events averaging one hundred or more participants. In 2014, Jay co-founded EssentialWorth with partner Judy Ozbun to help nonprofits better achieve their missions by using effective, engaging and affordable online technologies.