ACGME Educational Project Manager Victoria Kreps, PMP’s name is likely familiar to anyone who has attended or participated in any recent ACGME educational course or the Annual Educational Conference.

At the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, Athena Gonzalez and her team presented their poster, Strategies for Optimizing Fit Testing for Residents and the Evolving Role of the Program Coordinator, about their work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure residents were wearing properly sized and fitted masks and respirators, even as supplies changed.

Bree Bower and her team in the anesthesiology and pain medicine department at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio studied the affects of COVID-19 on fellow recruitment and presented that work at the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference in the Poster Hall.

2021 Debra L. Dooley GME Program Coordinator Excellence Awardee Dawn Fountain works in the general surgery residency program at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita.

2021 Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Ann Schwartz, MD is the director of residency education in psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine.

2021 GME Debra L. Dooley GME Program Coordinator Excellence Awardee Debra (Debbie) Kay Stevens is the program administrator for internal medicine at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University.

The Caribbean nation of Haiti faces unique challenges in putting its philosophy that “health care is a right” into practice. Kerling Israel, MD, MPH described the work of Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante (PIH/ZL) to improve the nation’s health care through graduate medical education (GME), and outlined the challenges faced and progress made in her recent Baldwin Seminar Series presentation, “Improving Graduate Medical Education in Haiti through Collaborative Work.” The talk was presented April 3, 2019 at the ACGME offices in Chicago. This talk was also the first of the series to be streamed online for a live audience.

Kelli Corning is the Associate Director of the University of Washington’s internal medicine residency program. She has been actively involved in program coordinator activities throughout her career in GME and participated in the full Annual Educational Conference, and also presented at the pre-conference Coordinator Forum. Additionally, this year Ms. Corning was a recipient of the ACGME’s GME Program Coordinator Excellence Award, which she received at the conference.

Dr. Chinelo Okigbo is a PGY-3 Internal Medicine Chief Resident at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in New Jersey. She attended the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference as part of the Back to Bedside initiative. As a resident and first-time Annual Educational Conference attendee, we asked her to share her impressions based on her experience.