Michael Makutonin, MD

When I went to my first SAEM conference, I was floored by the number of cool things I could get involved in at SAEM. That year was a blur – working with the SAEM research committee to put on talks, designing a machine learning series, and running a Datathon for med students. I always wondered what could have been possible if I could have gotten involved earlier, without the financial barrier of going to conferences, and benefited from the resources and mentors I ended up finding in SAEM.

I have been lucky to find opportunities to contribute and lead both in SAEM and in other organizations advancing emergency medicine. For four years I served as the curriculum representative at the George Washington School of Medicine, helping my classmates advocate for fairer grading and better feedback among other initiatives. I have also spent several years in the EMRA research committee, helping organize events like Case-Con, our annual national case conference for trainees. I’ve contributed to projects on ACEP informatics-focused committees using my background in machine learning. Finally, I've participated in organizing trainee-facing didactics and training events as part of the SAEM research committee and SAEM AI interest group.

Now as a PGY-1 resident at Yale, I am eager to leverage my experiences in emergency medicine and my passion for education to make SAEM a more inclusive, welcoming, and useful organization for all of us. The headwinds that emergency medicine is facing, like AI and workforce challenges, are opportunities in disguise, ones that require a lot of passionate work by medical students and residents interested in moving the needle in academic EM. If elected, I will work to ensure that MS1s can find what they are looking for in RAMS as easily as they can sign up for their local EMIG, that students and residents can find mentorship and contribute to projects no matter the resources of their home institutions.