Fair Play: Workplace Protections for Emergency Physicians, Our Patients, and Our Families (Wellness Committee Sponsored)

Katren Tyler, MD is an emergency physician at UC Davis in Sacramento, California, and a clinical professor of emergency medicine. Dr. Tyler grew up in Australia and completed an emergency medicine training program in both Australia and the United States. Her professional interests include emergency airway management, physician well-being, and geriatric emergency medicine. Dr. Tyler is the physician lead for the UC Davis Level 1 Geriatric ED Accredited Age-Friendly Emergency Department. Dr. Tyler is the inaugural fellowship director for the Geriatric Emergency Medicine fellowship. She is the Vice Chair of Geriatric Emergency Medicine and Wellness and is the Medical Director for Physician Wellness for UC Davis health system, coordinating the physician wellness champions and the health system peer responder process.

Paul Kivela, MD, MBA, FACEP is a residency trained and board certified emergency physician and Clinical Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Kivela was elected and served as President of the American College of Emergency Physicians from 2017-2018. He represented the diverse membership and served as spokesperson for the over 38,000 members. As Past President of ACEP, he has served as an international representative for the College. He was named the 2018 Napa County Physician of the Year, received the 2018 DFW Airport Hero Award and the International Gold Medal at the 2018 Intercontinental Emergency Medicine Congress, and recognized for his leadership as the recipient of the 2023 ACEP Wiegenstein Award.

Besides being a practicing emergency physician, he is a recognized expert in the areas of risk and error reduction, strategy and the economics of medical practice. He is known for his innovative and collaborative approach to finding solutions, bringing together disparate parties, and fostering future leadership.

He is frequently invited nationally and internationally to speak on his research, leadership and the future of medicine. He works diligently to keep up on medical advances that affect his patients. He has designed software and has twice been acknowledged to have one of SAEM's annual innovations in academic emergency medicine.

Al'ai Alvarez, MD (@alvarezzzy) is a national leader and educator on wellness, diversity, equity, and Inclusion. He is a clinical associate professor of Emergency Medicine (EM) and Well-Being Director at Stanford Emergency Medicine. He co-leads the Human Potential Team and serves as the Stanford EM Physician Wellness Fellowship Director. He is the Chair of the Stanford WellMD's Physician Wellness Forum and Director of the Physician Resource Network (PRN) Support Program. His work focuses on humanizing physician roles as individuals and teams by harnessing the individual human potential in the context of high-performance teams. This includes optimizing the interconnectedness between Process Improvement (Quality and Clinical Operations), Recruitment (Diversity and Representation), and Well-being (Inclusion and Belonging). He is one of the 2021-2022 Faculty Fellows at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign.

Dr. Michelle D. Lall, a board-certified emergency medicine physician, is a Professor at Emory University. She has been on faculty at Emory since 2013 where she served as an Associate Residency Director for 7 years. She is currently the inaugural Vice Chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Emory Emergency Medicine. She previously served as the inaugural Director of Wellbeing, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, as well as, the Medical Education Fellowship Director. Prior to coming to Emory, Dr. Lall was an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University beginning in 2008. She was an Assistant Residency Director at the Sinai-Grace/Wayne State University Emergency Medicine Residency Program and the medical student clerkship site director at Sinai-Grace/Wayne State University beginning in 2009. Dr. Lall is a graduate of Wayne State University School of Medicine. She completed her residency and chief residency at Emory University.  

Dr. Lall is actively involved in medical education. Dr. Lall’s primary interests are physician wellbeing and the negative impact of bias on equity and inclusion in medicine. She is particularly interested in gender differences in burnout and workplace mistreatment among emergency physicians. Dr. Lall serves as the inaugural chair of the All Emergency Medicine Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force, a national emergency medicine work group focused on exploring and addressing bias and disparities in academic emergency medicine. 

Her professional memberships include: American College of Emergency Physicians – where she is a fellow, Society for Academic Emergency Physicians - where she is part of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors, Academy for Women in Academic Emergency Medicine (AWAEM) - where she is a Past President, American Association of Women Emergency Physicians, and Georgia College of Emergency Physicians. She is also a member of the Delta Omega Honor Society. While at Sinai-Grace/Wayne State University, Dr. Lall was a two time "Faculty Teacher of the Year" award winner. At Emory, she has been a two time recipient of the “Faculty Advocate of the Year” award. In 2020, Dr. Lall was named one of the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association 25 Under 45 Influencers in Emergency Medicine whose contributions embody the spirit of the specialty. Dr. Lall is a recipient of the AWAEM Momentum Award and AWAEM Mid-Career Award. In 2023, Dr. Lall was selected for the prestigious Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine® (ELAM®) program, an intensive one-year fellowship of leadership training with extensive coaching, networking and mentoring opportunities aimed at expanding the national pool of qualified women candidates for leadership in academic medicine, dentistry, public health and pharmacy.

Dr. Lall is committed to caring for underserved patients in a safety net hospital, educating and training the next generation of emergency physicians, and serving the academic emergency medicine community.

Valerie Dobiesz, MD, MPH, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, is an emergency physician working clinically at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Tséhootsooí Medical Center in Fort Defiance and serves as the Director of the Front Line Indigenous Partnership (FLIP) Program which is dedicated to improving American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) health and eliminating existing health disparities. She is a core faculty in the BWH emergency department’s Office of Inclusion Diversity, Equity and Social Justice and a core faculty member of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) where she directs programs on Indigenous Health Disparities and Medical Education in War and Conflict. She is nationally recognized for her emergency medicine courses for medical professionals in the areas of simulation education, maternal health, gender equity, orthopedics, and wilderness and expedition medicine. To address the lack of a sufficient AIAN healthcare workforce she partners with Tribal leaders on developing and supporting multiple pathway programs for Indigenous youth to pursue healthcare careers including the Medicine Pathways to Advancing Tribal Healthcare program, Saint Michael Indian School Premedical Society, San Carlos Apache Premedical Summer Program, North American Center of Boston Medicine Ways Pathway Program, and the relaunching of the National Native American Youth Initiative program in collaboration with the Association of American Indian Physicians. She has presented over 200 national and over 100 international lectures on a variety of subspecialties in emergency medicine in Peru, India, Nepal, Tanzania, Antarctica, Cuba, the Philippines, Haiti, Galapagos, Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, Fiji, New Zealand, Bhutan, Ukraine, and Argentina.