Lori Berkowitz, MD - Course Director

Dr. Lori Berkowitz joined the faculty of Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in 1997, following her graduation from the OB/GYN Residency Program at Brown/Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, where she served as Administrative Chief Resident. She has been a board-certified Obstetrician/Gynecologist since 1999, and a certified subspecialist in Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery since 2013.  She is a longstanding Oral Board Examiner for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  In 2005, Dr Berkowitz completed the Rabkin Fellowship in Medical Education at the Carl J. Shapiro Institute for Education and Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She has been an invited participant in education leadership courses including the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Executive Education Program in Leadership Development, the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization Leadership Development Program, and the Association of Professors in Gynecology & Obstetrics Academic Scholars and Leaders Program.  She is a current member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Professors and Gynecology and Obstetrics (APGO), and serving as the Program Co-Chair for the CREOG & APGO Annual National Meeting.

Dr. Berkowitz was the Program Director for the BWH/MGH Integrated Residency Training Program in Obstetrics & Gynecology from 2004-2009. She is currently Associate Director of Graduate Medical Education at Partners Healthcare, overseeing surgical and procedural training programs and Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals.  She serves as the Course Director for the GME Program Director Workshops and has served as the chair of the GME Wellness Task Force. Dr. Berkowitz is also a longstanding Patient-Doctor III Tutor for the MGH Harvard Medical School students. She is currently the Vice Chair of Education at Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Dr. Berkowitz’s passion for medical education is evident in her many honors; including the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Association of Professors of Gynecology & Obstetrics, the CREOG National Faculty Award for Excellence in Resident Education and several departmental resident teaching & faculty mentoring awards.

Neal Chen, MD

Neal Chen, MD is the Program Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Hand and Upper Extremity Fellowship. He has served in this capacity for 4 years. He was previously faculty at the Philadelphia Hand Center/ Thomas Jefferson University Hand Fellowship and at the University of Michigan Sports Medicine Fellowship prior to his time in Boston. He was a resident at the Harvard Orthopaedic Combined Program and graduated from the MGH Hand Fellowship and Shoulder and Sports Medicine Fellowship at the Hospital for Special Surgery. 

John Patrick Co, MD, MPH

Dr. Co is Director of Graduate Medical Education (GME) for Partners HealthCare and Director of Pediatric Ambulatory Quality and Safety at the Mass General Hospital for Children.  As Director of GME, he provides leadership and oversight for residency and fellowship programs at Partners institutions, including the Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals.  In his pediatric role, he helps leads efforts to utilize principles of quality improvement and patient safety to improve care delivery for children, including working with primary care and subspecialty divisions to develop quality and safety initiatives.  He has extensive experience and published research in the areas of quality measurement and improvement, health information technology, and medical education.

Dr. Co is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Pediatrician at the Mass General Hospital for Children.  Dr. Co was educated at Cornell University, Stanford Medical School, and Harvard School of Public Health.  He completed his pediatric residency at Stanford University, fellowship in health services research at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and was a fellow in General Pediatrics Academic Development at Johns Hopkins.  He completed a Master’s in Public Health in Clinical Effectiveness at the Harvard School of Public Health, and his quality improvement training at Intermountain Healthcare.  He is helping lead efforts at Partners to ensure all residents and fellows receive training and are meaningfully engaged in quality improvement. He serves as the Associate Editor for the Quality Reports section of the journal Pediatrics.

George Dyer, MD

George Dyer MD, FACS is Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and an attending upper extremity surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  Dr. Dyer is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Combined Orthopaedic Residency Program and the Upper Extremity Fellowship of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Children's Hospital.   Dr. Dyer specializes in upper-extremity trauma surgery, as well as complex post-traumatic reconstruction of the elbow, shoulder, wrist and hand.  He also serves as Program Director for the Harvard Combined Orthopaedic Residency, one of the largest orthopaedic residency programs in the country with training sites at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Timothy Gilligan, MD, MS, FASCO

Dr. Timothy Gilligan is a medical oncologist, Vice-Chair for Education, and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute, where he served as the hematology/oncology fellowship program director from 2006-2015. He is currently co-director of the Faculty-In-Training program at the Academy on Communication in Healthcare and serves on their Board of Directors. Dr. Gilligan served on the leadership team that developed and launched the Cleveland Clinic Center for Excellence in Healthcare Communication, which has trained over 7000 clinicians in a one-day small-group experiential communication skills course. Together with Dr. Adrienne Boissy, he co-edited the book Communication the Cleveland Clinic Way. He has published numerous essays on healthcare communication in the New York Times, the Journal of Clinical Oncology and on the healthcare blog https://Cura.Space.

At Cleveland Clinic and other hospitals and at national and international conferences, he teaches communication skills, team-building, and coaching, and trains others to teach communication skills. Dr. Gilligan works on quality of care and clinical practice guidelines with the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the National Cancer Institute. He helped develop and serves on the faculty and steering committee of the ASCO Quality Training Program, and co-chaired the ASCO panel that wrote the society’s guideline on patient-clinician communication. He is currently a member of ASCO’s Education Council, which oversees the organization’s educational activities. Dr. Gilligan is an internationally recognized expert in testis cancer. He has contributed to a range of national and international guidelines on the disease and currently chairs the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Testis Cancer panel. He has co-authored numerous review articles, textbook chapters and Up-To-Date sections on testis cancer.

Dr. Gilligan graduated from Swarthmore College, Stanford University School of Medicine and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He trained in internal medicine and medical oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He also completed the Academy on Communication in Healthcare three-year faculty training program as well as the OncoTalk Teach program.

Elizabeth S. Ginsburg, MD

Dr. Ginsburg went to Wellesley College and graduated with a BA in English. She attended Mt. Sinai Medical School, and then BWH for residency in Ob/Gyn and Fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility. She is a professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at HMS. Her research interests are clinical and have focused on hormone metabolism, fertility preservation in cancer patients, and in vitro fertilization outcomes. She is a past president of the New England Fertility Society, and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies. She is on the Board and Executive Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and on the Ethics Committee of the ASRM as well. She has 4 children ages 24 to 29, and a husband. I like to ride horses, ski and travel in free time.

Ilona Goldfarb, MD, MPH

Dr. Goldfarb is an instructor in Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School.  She is an HMS OB/GYN clerkship co-director and a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital.  Dr. Goldfarb is a graduate of the Boston University School of Public Health and the UC Davis School of Medicine in California.  She completed a residency in OB/GYN at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in San Francisco and maternal fetal medicine fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital where she participated on the QI committees as a trainee.  She has completed the Partners Clinical Process Improvement Leadership Program and has joined the faculty teaching in the GME series.  Most recently, Dr. Goldfarb was a co-director of the combined BWH-MGH OB/GYN residency QI workshop.  Dr. Goldfarb’s clinical and academic interests include perinatal infectious disease, immunizations and immunity in pregnancy, and public health.

Elizabeth Harry, MD

Dr. Harry is one of the Assistant Medical Directors of the Brigham and Women's Physicians Organization and the Medical Director of Faculty Development and Wellbeing.  She is also an Assistant Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency: Director of Wellness and the Department of Medicine Faculty Development Director of Wellness.

Clinically, she is a hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s hospital. She attended medical school at the University of Colorado and completed her residency in the Hospitalist Training Track of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at the University of Colorado. She was on faculty at Colorado for 3 years prior to moving to Boston with her family in 2015. Her husband is a pathology resident at MGH and they have three children at home. She has been interested in wellbeing as long as she can remember and now does research in cognitive load, eager to improve systems to decrease unnecessary cognitive burden to allow for a return to joy and meaning in medicine.

Joseph O'Connell

Communications Specialist
Massachusetts General Hospital - Department of Medicine

Joe O’Connell is manager of special projects for the Department of Medicine at MGH, providing administrative support and leadership for a number of department initiatives including communications, strategic planning, and academic operations.

Jo Shapiro, MD, FACS

Dr. Shapiro is a surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, and an associate professor of Otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School. In 2008, she founded the BWH Center for Professionalism and Peer Support where she served as the director for over 10 years. During that time the Center became a model for institutions seeking methods to enhance trust and respect and helping improve clinician wellbeing.  She served on the Ethics and Professionalism Committee of the American Board of Medical Specialties and has held multiple educational leadership roles including: senior associate director of Graduate Medical Education for Partners HealthCare, founding scholar of the Academy at Harvard Medical School, and president of the Society of University Otolaryngologists. She was one of BWH’s first woman division chiefs. She serves on the faculty of the Harvard Leadership Development for Physicians and Scientists. She has an active surgical practice treating adults with oropharyngeal dysphagia. She was named as a finalist for the Schwartz Center Compassionate Caregiver Award. She is involved in global health medical education and training. Dr. Shapiro received her BA from Cornell University and her MD from George Washington University Medical School. Her general surgery training was at UC San Diego and then UCLA. She did her otolaryngology training at Harvard, followed by a year of a National Institute of Health Training Grant Fellowship in swallowing physiology. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Surgery at BWH since 1987. She is married to an internist, and they have three children.

Diane M. Sheehan

Sr. Accreditation Manager
Partners Graduate Medical Education
Massachusetts General Hospital

Diane Sheehan has been the senior accreditation manager in the Partners GME Office at MGH since 2012.  Prior to joining the GME Office, Ms. Sheehan was the residency program coordinator for the Harvard Combined Orthopaedic Residency Program, previously the Hand & Upper Extremity Fellowship coordinator at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and started her career working for the Chief of Clinical Orthopaedics at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston.

Ms. Sheehan graduated from Massachusetts Bay Community College with an Associate Degree in Medical Secretarial Science.  Diane is currently the Co-Chair of the Membership Committee for the Massachusetts Society of Academic Medical Administrators and was an active Steering Committee member on the Association of Residency Coordinators in Orthopaedic Surgery.

Nicole Smith, MD, MPH

Nicole Smith, MD, MPH, is Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School, and an attending Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Smith is a graduate of Tufts Medical School, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital Combined Residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Maternal Fetal Medicine Fellowship. She is the Associate Clinical Medical Director for Maternal Fetal Medicine and leads the Ambulatory Quality Care Program in the division. Dr. Smith teaches in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Advanced Course in Quality Improvement (the ACOG Safety Project Collaborative), as well as other local and regional QI education programs.

Jatin (Jay) M. Vyas, MD

Dr.  Vyas is an Associate Professor in Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases. In 1985, he attended the University of Texas at Austin in Plan II, a liberal arts honors program. He graduated with Special Honors from the University. From UT, he attended Baylor College of Medicine in their Medical Scientist Training Program where Jay received his PhD in 1994 and MD in 1996. He completed his PhD with Dr. Robert R. Rich in the area of Microbiology and Immunology and specifically worked on antigen presentation by MHC class I molecules. Upon completion of his MD in 1996, Jay moved to Boston to complete his medical internship and residency in internal medicine in the Department of Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He completed his fellowship in Infectious Diseases in the Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham and Women’s Hospital program. He then served as the chief resident in medicine for 18 months. Following a period of extended post-doctoral research training in the Harvard Department of Pathology and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research with Dr. Hidde Ploegh, Dr. Vyas joined the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital as an Assistant Professor in Medicine in 2007.

Dr. Vyas is internationally recognized for his work in fungal immunology, investigating the how our body responds to fungal pathogens. Invasive fungal infections are a leading killer of patients with compromised immune systems (usually from cancer or being a recipient of a transplant). He has distinguished himself by applying novel imaging modalities, including optical traps and live cell imaging, to investigate the molecular basis of recognition of pathogenic yeast by immune cells. His work has demonstrated that specific recruitment of mammalian proteins to phagosomes depends on its content and potently modulates the ensuing immune response. His laboratory is supported by NIH grants, industry collaborations and private philanthropy. He has clinical expertise in invasive fungal infections. He has been selected as an Infectious Disease Society of America Fellow. He has also elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He has also been elected as a Fellow in the American College of Physicians.

In 2014, Jatin was named the tenth Program Director of the MGH Department of Medicine Residency Program, supervising 199 interns and residents. As an NIH-funded investigator with interests in basic science, Dr. Vyas provides a unique perspective to the medical housestaff. He mentors physician-scientists who aspire to impact clinical medicine through investigation.

On a personal note, Jay spends a tremendous amount of his time mentoring the next generation of physicians and scientists. He has given talks internationally to discuss the value of mentorship. He is married and has two children, aged 20 and 17.

Debra Weinstein, MD

Debra Weinstein, MD is Vice President for Graduate Medical Education for the Partners Healthcare system.  In this role she oversees 285 graduate medical education (GME) programs with over 2200 residents and fellows.  Dr. Weinstein is a graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in Music.  After receiving her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, she completed clinical training in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital, was selected as Chief Resident, and later served as Associate Chief and Program Director in Internal Medicine.  She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and is involved in teaching and mentoring students, residents, and faculty.  Dr. Weinstein’s research relates to several aspects of medical education policy and practice, with a focus on GME.  She is a Director of the MGH Institute for Health Professions, a former Director of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, and a past-chair of the Association of American Medical College’s Group on Resident Affairs.  Dr. Weinstein serves as Deputy Editor of Academic Medicine, is a member of the New England Journal of Medicine’s Perspectives Advisory Board, and previously chaired the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Publications Committee and the ACGME Board’s Journal Oversight Committee.  She was a 2006-7 American Council on Education Fellow and is a recipient of the ACGME’s "Parker Palmer Courage to Lead Award".  Dr. Weinstein has been involved with several national task forces related to graduate medical education and chaired the May 2011 Macy Foundation conference focused on reforming GME.  She was a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Governance and Financing of GME and has chaired the planning committee for the National Academy’s October 2017 GME Outcomes and Metrics workshop. 

Alexis Werner, MPH

Alix Werner, MPH is a 2006 graduate of Connecticut College and a 2011 MPH graduate of the Boston University School of Public Health.  Focusing in healthcare policy and management, Alix began working at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Department of Neurosurgery first as Executive Assistant to the Chairman and later as Project Manager.  She joined the Department of Emergency Medicine in 2013 as Education Administrator for the combined BWH/MGH Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency (HAEMR).  During her time with HAEMR she has overseen the administrative, financial, recruitment, HR and credentialing functions of the program, including migrating the site sponsorship of HAEMR from BWH to MGH (2015) and completing/submitting its ACGME Self-Study (2018).  She has served as a member of various hospital and institutional committees and presented at local and regional conferences on topics related to career development, ERAS super user functionality, and CCC development.  As a two-time nominee for the Partners Healthcare Outstanding Program Administrator Award, Alix has been recognized for her detailed work and in fostering a supportive community within HAEMR.