Common Sense Medicine

Dr. Bryan Carmody writes a blog at the Sheriff of Sodium. He is a pediatric nephrologist, and an EVMS associate professor. He is an advocate for medical students and common sense. You can find him @jbcarmody

#58 - Medical School in the Time of Corona, STEP 1 Woes, and Doctor Drama. Find us on @csmedicine, and commonsensemd.com

Robert Croyle, PhD, was appointed director of the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in July 2003. You can learn more at https://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/od/director_rc.html

Dr. Adam Biener is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Lafayette College. Previously, he was employed as an economist at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in the US Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Biener's research focuses on medical care use and expenditures in the US. Specific areas of his research include the medical care costs of obesity, how the affordable care act has affected physician payments and the use of primary care, as well as racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare use. Dr. Biener received his PhD in Economics from Lehigh University in 2015. 

Louise Aronson is a physician, writer, and person. Learn more about her at https://louisearonson.com/about/

Priya Kantesaria is a fourth-year medical student at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Priya graduated from Rutgers University – New Brunswick, where she completed her bachelors in Genetics with minors in public health and health & society. At NJMS, Priya has focused on improving healthcare at a variety of levels. Priya has a passion for legislative advocacy. As an active member of the American Medical Association, Priya serves as the Committee on Long Range Planning Vice Chair where she works on studies & programming related to medical student debt & burnout. She serves as the NJ delegate to the House of Delegates where she represents NJ medical students. As the AAMC-OSR Northeast Legislative Chair, she focuses on developing the relationship between student-led advocacy and medical school administration. At her institution, she increases student access to pre-clinical resources by running academic support for first years and developing curriculum to teach students bleeding control. She active in the fight against sexual harassment & domestic violence through her work with the Title IX committee & the Domestic Violence Intervention Program. She believes strongly in preparing the next generation of physicians and has created curriculum for the Mini-Med School. As a future physician, she hopes to encourage physicians and patients to be active and empowered members in healthcare, whether that be through legislative action or everyday clinical care.

Travis Benson is an M1 at Harvard Medical School. Prior to medical school, Travis worked as a pipe welder for nine years. Motivated by the experience of being the child of a transgender parent and seeing the discrimination that the trans community faces in a clinical setting, Travis quit his job in 2015 to return to school to become a physician. He attended the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health and majored in Health Sciences as a non-traditional first-generation student. During undergrad, Travis was heavily involved in research. At OHSU, he conducted research on voice masculinization in transmasculine patients, created a health needs assessment study of the transgender and gender non-conforming community in Portland, and worked as a clinical researcher in a circadian rhythm lab. He also spent some time as a research fellow at the NIH as part of the Amgen Scholars program where he studied immunology. He has been heavily involved in mentoring students. As an undergrad, he founded a chapter of Phi Delta Epsilon at his school and tutored for the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and athletic department. Currently, he serves as a non-resident tutor for Harvard University where he helps pre-med students navigate the application process. Currently, he is involved in phalloplasty research at Boston Children’s Hospital and cutaneous T cell lymphoma research at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. He is part of the Derm Scholars program at HMS. He is one of the co-founders and moderators of the twitter chat, @MedStudentChat. He is interested in transgender health, dermatology, and bioethics, and one day hopes to combine those three interests in his career.

Dr. Jason Ryan is the creator of the website Boards and Beyond. Thousands of students from around the globe use his online videos and practice questions to prepare for the USMLE Step 1 exam. Dr. Ryan trained in internal medicine and cardiology at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he also served as a chief resident. In addition to his MD, he holds a Master of Public Health degree and a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering. He has been a faculty member at the University Of Connecticut School Of Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut for over 10 years.

Dr. Michael L. Barnett is Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Barnett received his MD from Harvard Medical School and completed a residency and fellowship in primary care and general internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Barnett’s research focuses on understanding and improving the health care delivery
system with specific interests in the role of physicians in the opioid epidemic as prescribers and providers of treatment for opioid use disorder as well as studying innovative models for health
care payment and care delivery. His research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, British Medical Journal and Annals of Internal Medicine and has received best
research of the year awards from the Society of General Internal Medicine and AcademyHealth. His research has also been featured or cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, CNN and The Economist. He is the recipient of a Career Development Award from the National Institute on Aging.

Professor Mamas trained in Medicine at the University of Oxford, undertaking an MA in Physiological Sciences in 1994 and a DPhil in Physiological sciences from 1994-1997. He completed his clinical training at the University of Oxford in 2000. Professor Mamas was appointed as Clinical Lecturer in Cardiology at the University of Manchester (2006) and completed his specialist training in Interventional Cardiology in 2012 and was appointed as a Senior Clinical Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at the University of Manchester. In 2015 he was appointed as Professor of Interventional Cardiology at Keele University. Professor Mamas is an Associate Editor of Circulation Cardiovascular Interventions and a member of the E-Cardiology working group of the European Society of Cardiology.

He is also a member of the NIHR interventional procedures review panel as well as sitting on several safety endpoint committees of several national randomized controlled trials. He is the Clinical Director of the Centre for Prognosis Research at Keele University, and leads a group of clinicians, data scientists and statisticians whose research interests focus around the use of routinely collected electronic healthcare data to inform the diagnosis, treatment and clinical outcomes of real-world patients with cardiovascular disease. His group uses national audit data derived from the national cardiovascular societies at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Outcomes Research (NICOR; https://www.ucl.ac.uk/nicor), data derived from primary care (Clinical Practice Research Datalink; https://www.cprd.com/intro.asp) as well as large datasets from the US such as the Nationwide Inpatient Sample and National Readmissions Dataset to study outcomes in patients with cardiovascular diseases. His work focuses around studying clinical outcomes, complications and assessment of treatment efficacy of interventions / medical treatments using real world data derived from the national electronic healthcare records of patients with cardiovascular disease, as well as prognostic modeling leading development of risk stratification tools used for national reporting in PCI and TAVR. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers using big data in populations with cardiovascular disease.