Author Biographies

Karolien Aelbrecht, PhD received her MA in Clinical Psychology from Ghent University in 2007, and her certificate to be a psychoanalytic therapist in 2010. She finished her PhD in Health Sciences in 2020, which focused on the patient perspective in patient-provider communication. Her dissertation is titled “Communication Through the Eyes of the Patient: The Role of Ethnicity, Language and Education.” She currently works as Project Manager at the Center for Medical Genetics of the Ghent University Hospital and is affiliated as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biomolecular Medicine of Ghent University. She’s currently training to be a genetic counselor.

Robert M. Arnold, MD is a Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and in the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law. He completed his medical school training at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and residency at Rhode Island Hospital. Subsequently he has been on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2000, Dr. Arnold was named the first Leo H. Creip Chair of Patient Care. The chair emphasizes the importance of the doctor-patient relationship, particularly at the end of life. He is the Director of the Institute for Doctor-Patient Communication and the Medical Director of the UPMC Palliative and Supportive Institute. He is clinically active in palliative care. Dr. Arnold has published on end-of-life care, hospice and palliative care, doctor-patient communication and ethics education. His current research interests are focused on educational interventions to improve communication in life-limiting illnesses and better understanding how ethical precepts are operationalized in clinical practice. He also is working with the UPMC Health System to develop system-wide, integrative palliative services throughout the health system. He is the Past-President of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities as well as the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

Amber E. Barnato, MD, MPH, MS is the John E. Wennberg Distinguished Professor and Director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She is trained in two medical specialties: general preventive medicine and public health and hospice and palliative medicine. Her research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of variation in end-of-life intensive care unit (ICU) and life-sustaining treatment use among seriously ill older adults using an array of scientific methods, including claims data analysis, participant observation and interviewing, high-fidelity simulation experiments, and randomized behavioral trials. Her work increasingly focuses on the interplay between organizational norms, provider-patient communication, and implicit cognition, and how these phenomena produce racial disparities in end-of-life treatment. This focus on implicit cognition motivates the exploration of patient and provider emotion and medical decision making described in chapter 13. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Barnato also collects and shares stories from family members regarding their experiences making life support decisions for patients in the ICU at her website www.ICUStoryWeb.org.

Mary Catherine Beach, MD, MPH is a Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on clinician attitudes of respect and communication with persons from marginalized groups and has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has received numerous awards including the Jozien Bensing Award for Outstanding Research contributing to Effective Healthcare Communication (given by the European Association for Communication in Healthcare), the 22nd annual George L. Engel Award for Outstanding Research contributing to the Theory, Practice and Teaching of Effective Healthcare Communication and Related Skills (given by the Academy of Communication in Healthcare), and the Daniel Nathans Scientific Innovator Award from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Paula H. Bednarek, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, School of Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University. Dr. Bednarek specializes in general obstetrics and gynecology with a focus in family planning, adolescent care, alternatives to hysterectomy and obstetrics. Her clinical interests range from complex contraception and public health, to international health care. Her research focuses on innovative contraceptive techniques including intrauterine devices, management of menstrual disorders, and improving pain during outpatient gynecologic procedures. Dr. Bednarek is very interested in public health and educating patients about their bodies and how to improve their health and quality of life. Her favorite part of being a doctor is helping patients through challenging situations and supporting informed decision making in health.

Anely Bekbergenova received her MSc in Finance from the University of Lausanne in 2017 and is now completing her PhD in Management in the department of Organizational Behavior at the HEC of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Her main research interests are in the area of gender differences, charisma, and entrepreneurship, with an additional interest in perceptions of artificial intelligence.

Danielle Blanch-Hartigan, PhD, MPH is Associate Professor of Health Studies in the Department of Natural and Applied Sciences and Director of the Health Thought Leadership Network at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. Her interdisciplinary research in psychology and public health aims to improve the patient and clinician experience and foster patient-centered care through better communication. Specifically, she studies how patients and clinicians use verbal and nonverbal behavior to form impressions and how these perceptions influence interpersonal interactions. She is currently working on an NSF-funded collaborative, panel survey project on the risk perceptions and behaviors surrounding COVID-19.

Missy Brown MD, MPH is a first-year Emergency Medicine resident at UCLA Ronald Reagan-Olive View. She completed her MPH at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she focused on the role of the Emergency Department in mitigating health disparities, immigrant health, as well as barriers to health care access. She is interested in the role of the Emergency Department in caring for those who have experienced trauma.

Elise C. Carey, MD, FAAHPM, FACP is an Associate Professor of Medicine and a practicing palliative medicine physician at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She currently serves as Education & Faculty Development Chair for the enterprise-wide Center for Palliative Medicine, supporting faculty and educational initiatives in Arizona, Florida, and the Midwest. Dr. Carey teaches communication and teaching skills to physicians across the country and has been recognized nationally for her work in education and program development, including winning the 2014 Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Physician Award. She has held several local and national leadership roles, including currently serving on the Board of Directors at the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine as a Partner at VitalTalk.

Valerie Carrard is a health psychologist who completed her PhD with highest distinction at the Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology of the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Her research focusses on humans’ ability to adapt to different medical situations and the resources facilitating this adaptation. Dr. Carrard’s PhD studies investigated the facilitators and beneficial effects of physicians’ behavioral adaptation to patients’ preferences in general practice interactions. As a postdoc researcher, she pursues the study of physicians’ interpersonal competences in the Lausanne University Hospital and supervises two PhD projects exploring patients’ longitudinal psychological adaptation to the onset of chronic health conditions in the Swiss Paraplegic Research of Nottwil in Switzerland.

Julie W. Childers, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. She is board-certified in both Palliative Medicine and Addiction Medicine, and serves as a hospital consultant in palliative medicine, addiction medicine, and medical ethics. She directs end of life communication courses both locally and nationally and has served as a mentor and a trainer to new communication teachers. Her writing, research, and teaching focuses on intersecting disciplines, including conducting goals of care discussions, teaching communication, and managing addiction in patients who are nearing the end of life.

Calvin L. Chou, MD, PhD is Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, and staff physician at the Veterans Affairs Health Care System in San Francisco. As Senior Faculty Advisor for External Education with the Academy of Communication in Healthcare (ACH), he is recognized internationally for leading workshops in relationship-centered communication, feedback, conflict, and remediation in health professions education. He has delivered communication skills curricula for providers at health systems across the country, including Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Stanford Health, New York Presbyterian, Advent Health System, and Texas Children’s Hospital. He has received numerous teaching awards at UCSF, and two of ACH’s national awards, the 2019 Healthcare Communication Teaching Excellence Award, and the 2018 Lynn Payer Award for outstanding contributions to the literature on the theory, practice, and teaching of effective healthcare communication and related skills. He is co-editor of the books Remediation in Medical Education: A Midcourse Correction, and Communication Rx: Transforming Healthcare Through Relationship-Centered Communication.

Lidia Del Piccolo, PhD, Psychologist, Psychotherapist, is a Full Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, and Chief of the Unit of Clinical Psychology at Verona University Hospital. After the degree cum laude in Psychology at the University of Padua, she concluded her PhD in Psychological and Psychiatric Sciences on “Doctor-patient interaction in general practice.” She contributed to the creation and standardization of different measures that evaluate emotions expression and doctor-patient communication during medical consultations (the Verona Medical Interview Classification System, VR-MICS; the Verona Patient Centered Communication Evaluation Scale, VR-COPE; the Verona Coding for Emotional Sequences, VR-CODES), which she applied also in research. In 2008 Lidia won the “EACH Jozien Bensing Research Award.” Since 2001 she has been teaching Clinical Psychology and Clinical Communication in Health Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Verona and has been working as Clinical Psychologist and Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist at the Mental Health Department of Verona Hospital.

Arnstein Finset, PhD, Cand Psychol, is Professor Emeritus at The Department of Behavioral Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo and Editorin-Chief of Patient Education and Counseling. He is accredited specialist in Clinical Psychology and Clinical Neuropsychology. His clinical experience is from the field of rehabilitation, particularly in neurorehabilitation and rheumatology. He has been active in the Norwegian Psychology Association to promote specialty accreditation of clinical neuropsychology in the 1980-ies and most recently clinical health psychology (2019). Before taking on academic positions he was Chief Psychologist at Sunnaas Rehabilitation Hospital. He has broad research experience and has published widely in the fields of clinical neuropsychology and clinical health psychology, in the last 25 years with an emphasis on clinical communication research. He has for more than 20 years taught clinical communication skills in medical school and other settings and has together with colleagues contributed to implementation of communication skills training in Norwegian hospitals based, in particular, on the Four Habits approach. In 2004-06 he served as President of the EACH – The International Association for Communication in Healthcare.

Bria Adimora Godley, MD, BS was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and is a fourth-year medical student at University of North Carolina School of Medicine. She graduated from Yale University in 2016 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Her words have appeared in The Atlantic, the Journal of the International AIDS Society, the Harvard Medical Student Review, and Current Opinion in HIV & AIDS.

Anne-Josée Guimond, PhD is a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research aims to understand how positive and detrimental aspects of psychological functioning impact the incidence of age-related diseases (e.g., cardiometabolic disease, cognitive decline) and the maintenance of optimal physical health through modifiable biological and behavioral factors. Dr. Guimond received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Université Laval (Canada), where her doctoral thesis focused on the role of emotion regulation in psychological adjustment to breast cancer. She is also a licensed psychologist in Québec, Canada, with expertise in health psychology, anxiety, mood, and sleep disorders.

Sarah D. Gunnery, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Division of Science, Health, and Education at New England College. Dr. Gunnery’s research focuses on stigma and quality life in people with chronic health conditions that affect nonverbal communication. She specifically studies facial masking in people with Parkinson’s disease and compensatory strategies to help people with Parkinson’s disease communicate emotion in their face more accurately.

Judith A. Hall, PhD is University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Emerita, at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. She is a social psychologist who studies interpersonal interaction, with a focus on person perception and nonverbal communication. For many years, she has applied these interests in the context of provider-patient interactions. With Debra Roter, she authored Doctors Talking with Patients/Patients Talking with Doctors: Improving Communication in Medical Care. Solo or co-authored nonclinical books include Nonverbal Sex Differences: Communication Accuracy and Expressive Style, and Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction. Her edited volumes include Interpersonal Sensitivity: Theory and Measurement and The Social Psychology of Perceiving Others Accurately.

Amanda R. Hemmesch, PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Survey Research Center at St. Cloud State University. Dr. Hemmesch’s research focuses on improving health, well-being, and quality of life for individuals with chronic conditions across the lifespan. Specifically, her research has examined stigma and social support in Parkinson’s disease and Moebius syndrome, a rare congenital condition that causes facial weakness/paralysis. Her current work focuses on improving access to health care and quality of life for individuals with rare conditions.

Martha Howell, EdD leads the Relationship Centered Communication program (ART of Communication) at Baylor Scott & White Health. Her educational background includes a B.A. in Psychology, MEd in Counseling and Human Development and a doctorate in Higher Education with an emphasis in medical education. She has served as a medical educator for 16 years and has a background in simulation/standardized patient instruction, faculty development and communication skill training. Currently, she is completing the Faculty in Training program through the Academy of Communication in Healthcare. Her areas of research include communication skills assessment in graduate medical education as well as multidisciplinary team communication.

Ben Kaplan, MD, MPH is a first-year family medicine resident at the University of North Carolina Hospital. He received his BA in English from Columbia University, and his MPH from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. In 2021, he will enter residency training in Family Medicine and plans to focus on mitigating health disparities through community-based participatory research and full-spectrum family care. He is a current Scholar of the Pisacano Leadership Foundation, as well as the American Academy of Family Physicians Emerging Leaders Institute. His work has been featured in the Annals of Family Medicine, Academic Medicine, and Progress in Community Health Partnerships.

Asif Khan, MD is a first-year psychiatry resident at the University of North Carolina Hospitals. He also received Bachelor’s in Psychology from UNC and medical degree from UNC School of Medicine. Born and raised in Bangladesh, Asif moved to the United States at the age of 13. In 2012, he founded the Refugee Community Partnership (RCP), a communitybased non-profit organization in North Carolina. RCP uses relationshipbased accompaniment, language justice, and cultural stewardship to build vibrant, safe, and healthy communities for forcibly displaced people that center mutual aid, transformative solidarity, and community power. Rather than charity, Asif emphasized solidarity and led an interprofessional team to design trauma-informed interventions and address social determinants of health. Before medical school, he served two years as an AmeriCorps fellow for RCP and then transitioned to its Board. In medical school, he dedicated a research year to combine his interests in medical education and non-profit by offering health professional students additional skills and opportunities to meaningfully care for refugee patients in the community setting through a “healthcare hotspotting” project under guidance of Dr. Amy Weil. RCP has won multiple grants or financial support including from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline, American Board of Pediatrics, and North Carolina Health Care Foundation.

Baruch S. Krauss, MD, EdM is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric emergency physician at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is deeply interested in how children experience healthcare and the factors that determine the quality of their experiences. His work focuses on developing systems for managing children’s pain and emotional states during medical encounters. He has developed a unique methodology for establishing trusting and cooperative relationships with children, which provides positive and rewarding healthcare experiences for them and their families. He teaches a curriculum based on the methodology to medical students and residents, and at workshops for practitioners domestically and internationally.

Benjamin A. Krauss received his ScM in Medical Sciences from Brown University in 2020 and will begin medical school in Fall 2021. He has a background in videography and video production and has, since 2014, been engaged in developing learning products for teaching medical students and health care professionals how to establish trusting relationships with children.

Laura D. Kubzansky, PhD, MPH is Lee Kum Kee Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Kubzansky has published extensively on the role of psychological and social factors in health, with a particular focus on the effects of stress and emotion on heart disease. She also conducts research on whether stress, emotion and other psychological factors help to explain the relationship between social status and health. Her other research projects and interests include the biological mechanisms linking emotions, social relationships, and health; relationships between early childhood environments, resilience, and healthy aging; and how interactions between psychosocial stress and environmental exposures may influence health. Dr. Kubzansky serves as Co-Director of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness, as Co-Director of the JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program, and as Director of the Society and Health Laboratory.

Lewina O. Lee, PhD is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Psychologist-Clinical Investigator at the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System. She received her PhD (Clinical Psychology–Aging) from the University of Southern California. She completed a Clinical Psychology internship at VA Palo Alto and a postdoctoral fellowship in Epidemiology at Boston University and VA Boston. Her research examines the role of psychosocial stress exposure – particularly early adversity – on lifespan health, and mechanisms which transmit the effects of stress on health, while adopting a lifespan developmental perspective. A related line of her research considers positive psychosocial factors which confer resilience against the effects of psychosocial stress exposure on health. She has been the Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on multiple awards from the National Institute on Aging.

Piet L. Leroy, MD, PhD, MSc is a pediatric critical care specialist and director of the Pediatric Procedural Sedation Unit at Maastricht University Medical Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands. He is an associate professor (domain of medical teaching) at the Faculty of Health, Life Sciences and medicine at Maastricht University and graduated in 2017 with a Master in Health Professions Education from the Maastricht School of Health Professions Education. His main research topics concern delirium in critical care and procedural sedation in children. Within these fields, he has published over 50 scientific papers, guidelines and book chapters and has presented 150 scientific lectures at international conferences. In 2013 he received the Catharina Pijls Prize for his research on improving procedural sedation quality in pediatrics. He is a board member of the International Committee for the Advancement of Procedural Sedation (www.proceduralsedation.org) and editor for the European Journal of Pediatrics. In 2018, he organized the first European Conference in Pediatric Procedural Sedation & Analgesia. Supported by the Charlie Braveheart Foundation (www.charliebraveheart.com) he set up in 2019 an interdisciplinary training program for procedural comfort in children.

Brett Marroquín, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. His research examines interpersonal influences on emotion, emotion regulation, and cognitive processing in healthy functioning and mood disorders, particularly within the context of intimate relationships. His current work focuses on the role of social relationships in emotional and mental health outcomes of major negative events, including cancer treatment and the COVID-19 pandemic, and how effective or ineffective support between relationship partners affects physical and mental health. His private practice in Los Angeles focuses on patients with mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and couple distress.

Marianne Schmid Mast is full professor of Organizational Behavior at HEC at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. She received her PhD in psychology from the University of Zurich. Her research addresses how individuals interact with each other in a professional context and part of her research focuses on physician-patient communication. She investigates how people perceive and communicate, verbally and nonverbally, how first impressions affect interpersonal interactions and evaluations, how people form accurate impressions of others, and how we can train social skills using new technologies such as virtual reality and computer based automatic sensing. She is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior and in the Editorial Board of the journal Leadership Quarterly. In 2018, 2019, and 2020, she has been named one of the 50 most influential living psychologists.

Enioluwafe Ojo, MD, MPH is a first-year psychiatry resident at University of North Carolina. She completed her Master of Public Health at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she focused on ethnic variations of pathways to mental health care. Currently, she serves as a trainee member of the Gold Humanism Honor Society National Advisory Council and the UNC Psychiatry Department DEI Task Force. Her research interests include medical education, mental health policy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion work.

Lars G. Osterberg, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine, Stanford School of Medicine is a recognized leader in medical education. He has been invited to present on medical education topics at national conferences and invited to teach bedside medicine or provide faculty development nationally and internationally on topics of medical education. In 2007 he was selected by the Senior Associate Dean of Education at the Stanford School of Medicine to direct the Educators for CARE program, a learning community of Stanford Medical School that provides a structured mentoring program for all medical students in the Stanford School of Medicine and he co-directs the Stanford Teaching and Mentoring Academy. His research interests are in areas of medical education, healthcare provider wellbeing, healthcare access and patient adherence to medications. In his clinical settings, undergraduates, medical students and house staff are enriched by his lessons in social justice and compassionate, respectful medicine. He received an undergraduate degree in bioengineering from UC Berkeley, an MD from UC Davis, and a Master’s in Public Health from UC Berkeley. For more information about Lars Osterberg’s teaching, research, publications, awards and service-related activities, please visit his profile on the Stanford Medical School website, http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Lars_Osterberg.

Erika B. Pages received her MA in Social Psychology from Arizona State University and is currently working toward her PhD. Her core research interest is in humor, with studies investigating why humor is a universally desired trait in mating partners, how humor can support emotion regulation in distressing situations, and the role humor can play in social support. She is also a collaborator on research examining the implications of several emotion regulation strategies for health behavior, particularly dietary added-sugar intake.

Debra L. Roter, DrPH, MPH is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with joint appointments in the Schools of Medicine and Nursing. Her research focuses on interpersonal communication dynamics within medical visits and its relationship to attitudinal, behavioral and clinical outcomes. Her studies also address the influence of social factors such as implicit race and gender bias, restricted literacy and poor English language proficiency on the medical dialogue and their consequences for disparities in medical care quality. Dr. Roter is well known for development of the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS) a quantitative method of medical dialogue assessment which has become the most commonly used system of its kind worldwide. She has authored over 300 articles and several books addressing issues related to these topics.

Mollie A. Ruben, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Maine and holds a joint appointment with the US Department of Veterans Affairs in the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research where she completed her postdoctoral fellowship. Dr. Ruben’s research focuses on social perception and the contribution of nonverbal behaviors to how we perceive others. Dr. Ruben applies social psychological methods to the study of doctor-patient interactions with a particular interest in understanding the communication of patient pain and ameliorating health disparities especially among sexual and gender minority patients.

Rachel Schwartz, PhD is a communication scientist and health services researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on systems-level interventions for improving clinician wellness, provider-patient communication, and developing medical education initiatives that provide clinicians with tools for navigating psychosocial aspects of the clinical encounter. She has experience leading research and quality improvement projects in pediatrics (Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital), neurology (Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute & Stanford School of Medicine), emergency medicine (Stanford) and primary care (Stanford and Palo Alto VA).

Michelle N. Shiota, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University, and Director of the Substance Abuse Translational Research Network at ASU. She is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and a member of the Society for Affective Science Executive Committee. Her basic science research focuses on differentiating features of specific positive emotions, emotion regulation processes and outcomes, and emotional mechanisms of close relationships. Her growing body of translational/applied research examines emotional and social cognitive mechanisms of health behavior and behavior change, including implications of stress and use of particular emotion regulation strategies for healthy diet, addictive substance use, and adoption of social distancing and hygiene behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Caitlin Holt Siropaides, DO is an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and the Director of the Vital Talk Program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She is a practicing palliative care specialist in both inpatient and outpatient care settings at Clements University Hospital and Simmons Cancer Center, two of the key training sites for the UT Southwestern Medical School and Graduate Medical Education programs. She completed Internal Medicine Residency and Palliative Care Fellowship training at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, during which time she developed a significant emphasis on communication skill training and medical education. She has received national certification in leading Vital Talk communication workshops, which deliver serious illness communication training for all levels of learners in the medical field. Her research and clinical interest focus on patient-provider serious illness communication, patient experience, and medical education. She has developed and implemented communication skill longitudinal curricula at UTSW for medical students, Internal Medicine residents, various fellowship subspecialties and faculty development.

Stuart Slavin MD, MEd is Senior Scholar for Well-being at the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). A graduate of Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Dr. Slavin completed his residency training in pediatrics at UCLA and then served as a faculty member there for seventeen years before returning to Saint Louis University as Associate Dean for Curriculum. Over the past decade, Dr. Slavin led efforts at SLU to improve the mental health of medical students that produced dramatic decreases in rates of depression and anxiety in pre-clerkship students. He joined the ACGME in 2018 and is helping to lead efforts to improve the mental health of residents and faculty across the US.

Greeshma Somashekar, MD, MBA is a first year Family Medicine resident at Swedish Medical Center/Cherry Hill in Seattle, WA. She graduated from Stanford University in 2016, and earned her MD and MBA degrees at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. She plans to pursue a career in health systems strategy and leadership, with a focus on bolstering high quality primary care and social services via alternative payment models and care delivery models that center health equity. Her clinical and research interests include trauma-informed care, gender affirming care, physician advocacy, and promoting self-compassion in medical training.

Morgan D. Stosic, MA received her BS in Psychology from Oregon State University in 2019 and is now a PhD student at the University of Maine in the area of Social Psychology. Her research is driven by a nonverbal communication lens and involves the accurate perception of individuals’ traits, states, and health. Within this broad area, she studies the basic processes involved in forming accurate impressions of another, as well as applied solutions that result from the inaccurate impressions of one another. Morgan actively collaborates with health professionals as well as artificial intelligence researchers in order to develop real world training and solutions to better person perception processes.

Linda Tickle-Degnen, PhD, OT is Professor of Occupational Therapy Emerita, School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University. Dr. Tickle-Degnen is a rehabilitation scientist and experimental social psychologist. Her work aims to translate basic knowledge about social psychological processes and daily life activity into person-centered health interventions for people and their families living with chronic health conditions that are stigmatizing. She focuses in on investigating biopsychosocial and health quality of life outcomes as related to nonverbal and verbal interpersonal behavior, therapeutic rapport, and social participation. Over a forty-year period, she has led multidisciplinary lab and field experimental studies, rehabilitation trials, longitudinal studies and mixed methods (quantitative-qualitative) studies. She was an early proponent of evidence-based rehabilitation through her writings and teaching nationally and internationally.

Vera Vine, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, Canada. She completed her doctoral studies in clinical psychology at Yale University and postdoctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the costs, benefits, and bio-social foundations of emotional awareness. She is especially interested in the contributions of emotion language and nervous system activity to the construction of emotion experience, and how pressures in the social environment become embedded in the body’s emotion responses over time. Dr. Vine is the recipient of multiple research fellowships and awards for teaching and leadership. Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, and is currently supported by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Canadian Foundation for Innovation John R. Evans Leaders Fund.

Amy Weil, MD, FACP is a Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill. She is a general internist with a longstanding interest in caring for survivors of violence and other vulnerable populations within her primary care practice. Since 2003, she has been Medical Co-Director of UNC’s hospital-based Beacon Program, a comprehensive program that cares for children, adults, and elder survivors of violence, as well as survivors of human trafficking and bullying. Dr. Weil serves as a clinician, educator, and mentor at UNC, teaching medical and other health professions students about ACES, Intimate Partner Violence, Trauma Informed Care, health care communication, reflection and narrative medicine, psychiatric care in primary care, provider wellbeing and innovative care delivery models. She advises a medical student interest group Intimate Partner Violence Awareness and Advocacy as well as the UNC Gold Humanism Honor Society chapter. Recently, she was Site Director on an Office of Women’s Health Grant to re-institute IPV screening in primary care via the North Carolina Coalition on Domestic Violence. She has authored cards in UpToDate about IPV, a chapter in the Springer book Trauma Informed Healthcare Approaches: A Guide for Primary Care, focusing on addressing provider wellness as well as other articles and chapters on topics of interest.