#ACGME2025 Keynote and Sunset Session Speakers Will Explore the Current and Future GME Landscape
Speakers presenting at the 2025 ACGME Annual Educational Conference will address a wide range of important topics and issues for those in the field of graduate medical education (GME). We’ve already previewed this year’s Featured Plenaries, each of which focuses on an area of relevance for GME today and into the future. This year’s keynotes and Sunset Session will also highlight critical considerations for the GME community. This post will provide a high-level overview of the important topics and speakers of these not-to-miss plenaries that serve as the bookends for #ACGME2025.
The Marvin R. Dunn Keynote Address
Pediatric surgeon, health equity advocate, founder of the Black Doctors Consortium, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Ala Stanford, MD will present, “A Surgeon's Fight for Health Justice” as the Marvin R. Dunn Keynote Address.
Dr. Stanford will discuss the importance of creating a learning environment to foster a health care system that supports everyone. She will explore advocacy, partnerships (public, private, community, academia, etc.), and health equity in action. After a short presentation, Dr. Stanford will be interviewed by Nikhil Goyal, MD, ACGME’s Senior Vice President for Accreditation. Their dynamic conversation will include how physicians can work individually and together to create an ecosystem of medical care that has lasting effects to protect everyone.
During her more than 20 years as a practicing physician, Dr. Stanford has significant hands-on experience improving care for the most vulnerable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Stanford used the infrastructure of her pediatric surgery practice to create a grassroots organization focused on education, testing, contact tracing, and vaccination in communities lacking access to care and resources. Building on that work, she opened a multidisciplinary ambulatory care center bearing her name, in a neighborhood in Philadelphia with one of the lowest life expectancies in the city.
A practicing physician for more than 20 years and founder of R.E.A.L. Concierge Medicine, Dr. Stanford is board-certified by the American Board of Surgery in both pediatric and adult general surgery.
Thomas J. Nasca Lecture
Saturday afternoon, physician scientist Stephen W. Trzeciak, MD, MPH will present the inaugural Thomas J. Nasca Lecture with a talk entitled, “The Science of Compassion in Medicine.”
Dr. Trzeciak will urge conference attendees to consider the question, “Does compassion really matter?” and make the case that compassion isn’t just a feeling—it’s an aspect of care that is important in both meaningful and measurable ways.
Dr. Trzeciak will share his own experience of burnout and how compassion was a key to his recovery and can be vital for others facing the same. Research shows compassion has measurable beneficial effects on patients across a variety of conditions and moves patients to take better care of themselves. Importantly, research also supports that compassion can be beneficial to the clinician too.
Dr. Trzeciak is the Edward D. Viner Endowed Chief of Medicine at Cooper University Health Care, and Professor and Chair of Medicine at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in Camden, New Jersey. He is a practicing specialist in intensive care medicine, and a clinical researcher with more than 100 publications in the scientific literature. Broadly, Dr. Trzeciak’s mission is to illuminate the power of empathy, compassion, and hope – through science.
Sunset Session
During the Sunset Session on Friday, February 20, ACGME Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer William McDade, MD, PhD and American Public Health Association Executive Director Georges D. Benjamin, MD, MACP will explore the current state of racial and ethnic health care disparities in the US and offer insight into successful and unsuccessful intervention strategies and will make recommendations to advance health equity in GME.
Initial findings from the task force assembled by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will be discussed. Building on the 2003 consensus report “Unequal Treatment,” Dr. Benjamin co-chaired the National Academy of Medicine’s task force to revisit and update what has become the publication “Ending Unequal Treatment.”
Visit the conference website and browse all the learning opportunities offered throughout the conference. Register soon; online registration closes January 29!