2023 SAEMF Grantees

I am an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School, research staff at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a biostatistician/epidemiologist at the Emergency Medicine Network (EMNet). I provide statistical support and expertise for all EMNet projects. I am also a paramedic with expertise in emergency medical services (EMS) research. I began my career as an emergency medical technician and then paramedic, providing me with valuable first-hand insight into the prehospital care system and, specifically, stroke care in the prehospital setting.

My research has focused on the EMS workforce and systems of care. I have specific training and expertise in survey research, large dataset analyses, geospatial methods and analyses, as well as statistical methods such as mixed effects modeling and generalized estimating equations. During my doctoral training at The Ohio State University, I served as an EMS Research Fellow at the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians, gaining valuable experience conducting EMS and emergency medicine research.

Dr. Preiksaitis is a medical education fellow and clinical instructor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University. He completed his medical training at New York University School of Medicine and a residency in emergency medicine at Stanford. His scholarly interests include digital media and medical education, reproductive health care in the emergency department, and heath care innovation. Dr. Preiksaitis is currently pursuing a master's degree in medical education at the University of Cincinnati. His grant project, the Evaluation of Learning Resources (EvaLeR) in Emergency Medicine will develop a new method to rigorously compare the quality of emergency medicine textbooks and digital learning resources. The results of this work will help to inform selection and development of learning materials for future emergency medicine education.

Dr. Kean is a clinical assistant professor and director of clinical trials in the emergency department at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She completed her medical school training at the University of Virginia and her emergency medicine residency at Temple University. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Kean has been engaged in numerous projects related to pandemic response, including spearheading the development of surge plans in the emergency department, building partnerships with Philadelphia’s public schools to increase children’s access to COVID-19 vaccines, and providing support for long-term care facilities experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks as head of Rapid Response Teams for Jefferson’s RRHCP team. She has also served as principal investigator and co-investigator on several COVID-19 related research grants.

Dr. Chary is an emergency physician and health services researcher at Baylor College of Medicine. She attended Washington University School of Medicine and served as chief resident at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency. Dr. Chary is an anthropologist whose research focuses on health disparities and healthcare delivery for vulnerable populations. Her international work includes development of child nutrition, women’s health, and specialty care referral programs in rural areas, and her domestic work centers on geriatric emergency medicine. She also focuses on improving health care delivery for vulnerable populations in the emergency department (ED); prior work includes a program to create prepackaged to-go medications for homeless patients and initiatives to provide COVID-19 vaccination from the ED.

Dr. Chary’s current research focuses on improving emergency care for older adults, both generally and specifically for those with cognitive impairment. As the recipient of a National Institute of Aging GEMSSTAR Award and SAEM Foundation GEMSSTAR Supplement, she is investigating the feasibility of implementing geriatric screenings in the ED and is pursuing mentored training in geriatrics and implementation science.

Dr. Haas is a practicing emergency physician at the University of Michigan. He completed medical school at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine, and residency at the University of Michigan, where he served as chief resident. Dr. Haas works clinically in the U-M Adult Emergency Department and the Emergency Critical Care Center (EC3), and is assistant medical director of the EC3. His clinical and scholarly interests include emergency department based critical care delivery, diabetic ketoacidosis management, and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, including extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Dr. Jennifer Carey is division director for undergraduate medical education and education fellowship director at UMass Chan Medical School. She is involved in developing educational curriculum for students at all levels in medical school and focuses on integrating topics in health equity into her teaching. She has been recognized locally and nationally for her commitment to education.

Dr. Coneybeare grew up in the pacific northwest and transplanted to New York for her medical training. She completed her residency at Bellevue Hospital/New York University Medical Center and stayed on for her ultrasound fellowship and concurrently completed a Master of Health Professions Education from Maastricht University.

Dr. Coneybeare now serves as the fellowship director of emergency ultrasound at Columbia University Medical Center. Her master’s thesis focused on motivational factors that influenced the adoption of innovations where one of the primary findings revolved around professional identity formation. Her prior master’s work along with her current position as fellowship director launched her current medical education research interest revolving around post-graduate professional identity formation. 

Karri Weisenthal, MD/MHS is a fellow in Addiction Medicine at Boston Medical Center, per diem attending in Emergency Medicine at Boston Medical Center, and clinical instructor at the Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine. She graduated cum laude from the Yale School of Medicine and completed her residency training in Emergency Medicine at Boston Medical Center, serving as education chief during her final year. She has been recognized for her academic merit and teaching abilities, receiving awards such as the David A. Frommer Award for Academic Excellence and the Senior Resident Teaching Award. Upon completion of her fellowship, she has accepted a position at Boston Medical Center with joint appointments in emergency and addiction medicine.

Dr. Weisenthal is an active researcher in the fields of emergency and addiction medicine. Her current research interests include improving initiation and access to medications for opioid use disorder in the emergency department (ED) with an equity lens, ensuring smooth transitions of care from the ED to outpatient settings for patients identified with a substance use disorder, and integrating a harm reduction approach into the care of patients who use drugs in the ED. She is grateful to have been awarded the NIDA Mentor-Facilitated Training Grant, and the opportunity to develop an ED provider and nursing curriculum focusing on the incorporation of harm reduction into the care of patients who use drugs and access emergency services.

Dr. Sidhu is a third-year resident at New York Medical College Metropolitan/Harlem EM Residency and residency director of administration and addiction medicine. Dr. Sidhu was born in India and grew up in the bay area in Pleasanton, California. He attended California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for undergrad, majoring in biological sciences with the concentration of anatomy, physiology and microbiology. Dr. Sidhu attended Touro University California for both masters and medical school. His emergency medicine interests are administration, quality control, and medical education.

Adam Laytin, MD MPH is an assistant professor of an Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine and Emergency Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 

His areas of clinical expertise include surgical critical care and emergency medicine. His research interests include injury epidemiology and prevention, social determinants of health, and emergency medicine, critical care and trauma systems in resource-limited settings. He has collaborated with clinicians and researchers in the US, Ethiopia, India, South Africa and Israel. 

His current research, conducted in collaboration with emergency physicians and intensivists in Ethiopia, addresses the burden of medical emergencies, critical illness and trauma in low- and middle-income countries with the goal of developing data-driven, context-appropriate quality improvement and capacity building initiatives to improve the care of critical ill and injured people worldwide. 

Dr. Panda is a pediatric emergency medicine fellow and pediatric global health subspecialty fellow at Stanford University. She earned a bachelor of science degree from Cornell University in Nutrition and Global Health. She went on to earn an MD, with distinction in advocacy, from Albany Medical College. Dr. Panda completed her pediatric residency training at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital/Case Western Reserve University, where she earned specialized certificates in child advocacy and research. She is currently earning a Master of Science in Health Policy at Stanford University, which she will complete over the course of her fellowship.

Dr. Panda has worked with trafficked youth for over 10 years, with involvement in direct clinical care, research, legislative advocacy, and education. Her research currently focuses on identifying disparities in the delivery and access of emergency care for trafficked children, and the development of emergency department-based interventions to support at-risk youth. During pediatric residency, Dr. Panda co-founded the Haven Clinic, a medical home that provides trauma-informed medical care to survivors of child trafficking. Dr. Panda has received awards both locally and nationally for her work, including recent recognition by the Boston Congress of Public Health as a 40 Under 40 Public Health Catalyst awardee.

Dr. Moss is currently an assistant professor of emergency medicine, assistant director of simulation education, and director of emergency medicine PA/NP education at Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center Moses Campus in the Bronx, NY. She completed her emergency medicine residency and simulation fellowship at the Zucker School of Medicine, North Shore Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Dr. Moss is passionate about all aspects of residency education and is particularly interested in increasing learner engagement in didactics. She is excited to spend the next year completing her project on palliative care simulation for emergency medicine residents.

Dr. O'Shea is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and currently serves as the assistant director for clinical electives in the emergency department. Originally from Maryland, he received a medical degree from Emory University School of Medicine, where he was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. While in medical school, he completed a Master’s in Public Health, with a focus on health policy, at Rollins School of Public Health. During his residency and chief residency at Vanderbilt, Dr. O’Shea won several teaching awards, including the House Staff Clinical Teaching Award. His primary area of interest is undergraduate medical education. 

Dr. Bunch is resident physician in the combined emergency medicine/internal medicine at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. His research interests include the resuscitation of the undifferentiated critically ill patient in the emergency room and the care thereafter in the intensive care unit. More specifically, Dr. Bunch’s research applies point-of-care viscoelastic hemostatic assays (e.g., thromboelastography [TEG], resonant acoustic rheometry [RAR]) to guide individualized blood component ratios and hemostatic adjuncts for severely hemorrhaging and/or coagulopathic patients. This interest sparked in medical school under the guidance of the legendary Dr. Mark Walsh wherein, early in the pandemic when clinicians were bereft of evidence, he was applying TEG to guide anticoagulant therapy and prevent bleeding/thromboses for inpatients with COVID-associated coagulopathy.

Since, then Dr. Bunch’s  interests have expanded to goal-directed massive transfusion, tertiary hemostasis, shock-induced endotheliopathy, trauma-induced coagulopathy, sepsis-induced coagulopathy, post-cardiac arrest syndrome-associated coagulopathy, and anticoagulant reversal —  areas where the early diagnosis and reversal of deranged blood viscosity, clot formation and termination, and endotheliopathy may enable optimization of macro- and microvascular blood flow to prevent further organ dysfunction/failure for the patient in shock. 

Dr. Ata is a second year emergency medicine resident at Duke University. Prior to joining Duke, he completed MD and PhD training at Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine, with a focus on improving predictability and reliability of genome editing outcomes in vertebrates using tools such as CRISPR-Cas9. His work has led to a better understanding of local triggers for robustly activating an understudied DNA repair pathway, MMEJ (microhomology-mediated end joining), resulting in targeted induction of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) sequence changes, precise down to the single nucleotide level. As an emergency medicine resident, Dr. Ata is interested in developing molecular diagnostic tools for emergency department-relevant pathologies, starting with bedside detection of bacteremia using CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) to better inform antibiotic stewardship.

Dr. Horace is first-year resident at Duke University Medical Center with a research interest in emergency department disparities in underserved populations as well as pain outcomes. His recent scholarly work includes presenting pain research at national annual conferences, mentoring medical students, and being actively involved in community outreach.

Dr. Anisha Turner is an educator, patient advocate and Texas native physician that completed her undergraduate training at Rice University in Houston, Texas and her medical school training at UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. For residency, she left the lone star state to pursue a combined emergency medicine and family medicine residency training program at Louisiana State University, one of only two programs of its kind in the country. After emergency/family medicine resident training, she returned to Texas as an education and administration fellow at Baylor College’s of Medicine’s Section of Emergency Medicine. During fellowship, she received her MBA in Health Administration and completed several projects in patient safety, health equity and interprofessional education. She currently serves as an assistant professor, core faculty, and assistant director of justice, equity and inclusion for the Department of Emergency Medicine Residency program. She is also an adjunct faculty with the Family Medicine Department and serves as course director for multiple undergraduate medical education courses. 

Dr. Turner’s interests focus on interprofessional education, health equity, patient advocacy/safety, and health administration including interdepartmental relations, care transitions, quality improvement, and feedback and evaluation.

Giselle Appel is a medical student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prior to medical school, she conducted research at the intersection of emergency medicine and psychiatry. Her current research focuses on utilizing psychodynamic theory to inform better care that patients receive in both acute and inpatient hospital settings, as well as for the physicians who treat them.

Giselle has received prior research awards and funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, or German Academic Exchange Service) Study and Internship Program (SIP) via Columbia University, Infectious Disease Society of America, Clinical and Translational Science Center at Weill Cornell Medical College, and the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts.

Upon entering medical school, she continued her work in medical education initiatives, while still maintaining close association with her interests in psychotherapeutic models of care and object relations theory. Giselle believes in the power of the therapeutic alliance and holding environment — consisting of empathy, patience, and active listening —- to best guide patients toward an understanding of their symptoms, medical care, and healing.