Please see below a complete list of 2025 President's Grants, divided by priority area.
This project will support a podcast series focused on innovations in health professions education (HPE) scholarly work, spotlighting the unseen decisions, emotions, and narratives behind published papers. The goal of the podcast is to uplift early-career and underrepresented scholars and their work by discussing a paper, presentation, or project in HPE, highlighting its ideas and methods. Following that discussion, the scholars behind that work will join the conversation to provide their personal backstory in developing the project.
Principal Investigators: Hannah Kakara Anderson, MBA, PhD, and Benjamin Kinnear, MD, PhD, MEd
This project will study the impact of an intervention designed to evaluate and improve the performance of inpatient medicine housestaff teams at Tufts Medical Center. Using a unique direct observation tool, investigators will perform repeated observations of 36 housestaff teams during morning work rounds over the course of a year to identify factors that support or degrade team performance and assess the impact of structured feedback on team performance.
Principal Investigator: Saul N. Weingart, MD, MPP, PhD
This award will be in support of the 2025 Cobb Symposium, entitled “Code, Context, and Care: AI at the Crossroads of Healthcare, Research, & Workforce Development,” to be held at the July 20 National Medical Association (NMA) Convention and Scientific Assembly.”
Principal Investigators: Randall Morgan BA, MD, MBA, and Ronnie A. Sebro BS, MS, PhD, MD
This evidence-based educational initiative is designed to strengthen interprofessional collaboration, ethical decision-making, and humanistic health care. Through scenario-based modules delivered during inpatient rounds, the program equips residents and nurses with practical tools and strategies to foster trust, safety, and kindness in patient care. Key challenges such as poor communication, erosion of patient trust, inadequate ethical training, and the decline of humanism in clinical practice will be addressed, with the overall goal of improving the overall healthcare and educational climate.
Principal Investigator: Kathleen Reeves, MD FAAP
The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation supports open access for a special issue of the journal DIAGNOSIS to commemorate the National Academy of Medicine's landmark publication "Improving Diagnosis in Medicine." Papers will describe research, pragmatic projects, education, equity, the role of artificial intelligence, and other aspects of training health professionals to reduce diagnostic error.
Principal Investigator: Edward P Hoffer MD, FACP, FACC, FACMI
This project will address ethical issues around the end-of-life and organ donation by developing and implementing a first-in-kind, virtual, online Brain Death (BD)/Death by Neurology Criteria (DNC) curriculum with interactive, case-based simulations and individualized, learner-specific feedback. BD/DNC is an event that usually occurs in a stressful, ethically charged environment. This project will prepare learners in a controlled and safe environment to enter the live clinical setting with increased competency and confidence. The curriculum will be piloted at 10 institutions in the US.
Principal Investigators: Sarah Wahlster, MD, and James Town
This curriculum integrates visual thinking strategies (VTS), narrative ethics, and medical professionalism into clinical education to foster a more ethical, humanistic approach to medical practice. The curriculum addresses moral distress and burnout caused by systemic pressures in healthcare by helping students and faculty engage with real-world ethical challenges through reflection, art-based learning, patient stories, and group discussions. Faculty will be trained in VTS and collaborate with experts in narrative medicine and visual arts to strengthen the teaching of patient-centered care.
Principal Investigators: Siobhan Hollander MD, and Ellen Pearlman MD, FACH, FACP
The 2026 symposium “Medical and Business Ethics: Ensuring the Primacy of Patient Care” is part of the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) program. This event will bring together national leaders in bioethics, healthcare, hospital administration, and adjacent business leaders, as well as FASPE alumni and faculty, to discuss pressing topics around medical ethics and the intersection of medical and business ethics, focusing on how to uphold patient care in healthcare practices.
Principal Investigator: Rebecca Scott, BA, MA
The Healthcare Equity and Retention in Obstetrics and Gynecology (HERO) project is a national initiative investigating the mental health, moral distress, and systemic challenges faced by OBGYN residents across the US. Building on the Intern Health Study (HIS) initiative, HERO focuses on how regional disparities in access to reproductive healthcare impact physician well-being. The project aims to identify key stressors affecting the workforce and will inform evidence-based strategies to address workforce shortages, and retention, and ensure high-quality reproductive care.
Principal Investigator: Helen Kang Morgan, MD
This project will support the creation of a national set of competencies in artificial intelligence which would ensure that all medical learners – regardless of where they train – gain foundational knowledge in AI principles, understand its ethical and legal implications, and are equipped to collaborate with data scientists and technologists in health care settings. Ultimately the goal is to ensure that all learners and providers are prepared to deliver safe, effective care, while also leading in an evolving digital healthcare landscape.
Principal Investigators: Alison Whelan, MD, and Lisa Howley, PhD, MEd
This project will support an interprofessional education project implemented by the CU Nursing Fort Lewis College Collaborative, which connects the state’s flagship medical institution with the rural, Indigenous-serving campus in the Four Corners region of Colorado. The project will develop and implement a culturally inclusive, longitudinal interprofessional ethics and health equity curriculum for the new rural nursing program, including didactic courses, simulation, and clinical application experiences, with community stakeholders actively engaged in the development process.
Principal Investigator: Suzanne Brandenburg MD
This project aims to embed shame competence as a core professional practice; i.e., the ability to constructively engage with, and avoid inducing shame while mitigating its destructive potential. They will establish a shame-competent Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Duke University through structured training sessions tailored to faculty, departmental leaders, learners, and clinical staff.
Principal Investigator: William Bynum, MD, PhD