Past Award Winners

2007 Mid-Career Faculty Achievement Award Winner:
Julie Scott Taylor, MD, MSc
Department of Family Medicine
Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island
111 Brewster Street, Pawtucket, RI 02860
Phone: (401) 729-2980
Fax: (401) 729-2923
Email: julie_taylor@mhri.org or julie_taylor@brown.edu

My primary mission as an academic family physician is to empower women including patients, students, residents, and other faculty through my work as a clinician, educator, researcher, and advocate. In my six years as the Director of Predoctoral Education in the Department of Family Medicine at Brown Medical School, I have developed two major areas of interest: medical education and maternal-child health. As an educational administrator, I have developed, implemented, and evaluated innovative curricula which have resulted in significant improvements in the core Family Medicine Clerkship. As a teacher, I have taught extensively at different levels of training and in a wide variety of formats. I have received consistently outstanding personal teaching evaluations as well as several major teaching awards. As a scholar, I have presented frequently at well respected regional and national Family Medicine education and interdisciplinary breastfeeding conferences and written numerous papers and grants. I integrate teaching, particularly of medical students, into all aspects of my career. I believe that my work as an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine epitomizes a successful Brown Medical School Teacher-Scholar.

I lead the four-person Predoctoral Division in the Department of Family Medicine at Memorial Hospital of RI. We work with 144 family physicians at 62 local community sites in 14 different courses that span the four years of medical school. Primarily I administer and teach in the Family Medicine Clerkship, a six-week required course for third- and fourth year medical students. As the Clerkship Director, I have conducted two major overhauls of the entire course and its curriculum and recruited more that thirty preceptors and teachers. I have also introduced several innovations to the course including a Service Learning experience at a local social service agency for urban Latinos and an iterative patient tracking system for documenting clinical encounters using personal digital assistants. I have consistently received the highest ratings of any teacher in the course, garnering a Dean’s Teaching Award every year from the medical school and a Faculty Award twice from the graduating class of medical students.

In addition to my work with the clerkship, I have been the faculty course leader for a student-run preclinical elective called Medical students Outreach to Mothers-to-be (MOMS) Program since its inception in 2001. This popular elective pairs preclinical students with prenatal patients for a continuity and advocacy experience during the first year of medical school. I have guided this course through annual administrative and student leadership changes. Each year, the student leaders have co-presented some aspect of their work at a medical education conference. I also frequently supervise students’ Community Health Clerkship projects, routinely precept a fourth-year student in my continuity practice, and serve as a formal advisor for students applying to family medicine residency programs and an informal advisor to many others. Although my main administrative responsibility is medical student education, I work regularly with the family medicine residents and fellows in the outpatient and inpatient clinical settings as well as supervise individual academic endeavors.

My scholarship is focused in two areas: medical education and breastfeeding. Many of my medical education innovations have been presented at regional and national meetings and published in the peer-reviewed primary care medical education literature. Often medical students copresent and co-author with me. I have received a large, three-year federal education grant from the Health Resources and Service Administration for innovations in the Family Medicine Clerkship as well as numerous other smaller medical education grants. As a complement to my primarily maternal-child health clinical practice, I am certified as a lactation consultant and conduct breastfeeding research ranging from secondary analyses of national data sets to evaluations of educational interventions to increase breastfeeding rates. I have developed a regional and national reputation as a breastfeeding clinician, educator, researcher, and advocate through multiple projects, presentations, and publications. My work with high school students teaching them the benefits of breastfeeding as well as the deceptions of infant formula marketing strategies received first prize at the annual conference of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, the international multidisciplinary organization of physicians interested in breastfeeding medicine. I first-authored a literature review on breastfeeding and diabetes with one of the leading breastfeeding experts in the country.

My leadership efforts have also been concentrated on education and maternal-child health. At the state level, I was a founding member of the Rhode Island Physicians for Breastfeeding in 2002, a group that has successfully passed workplace protection legislation for breastfeeding mothers and is currently negotiating with insurance companies to provide new mothers with electric breast pumps. I have made substantial contributions to a cross-disciplinary, state-wide “Mom-Doc-Family” support group for mothers in medicine that is now being used as a model by women physician mothers in other states. I am a leader in the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM), the national academic organization devoted to medical education in family medicine. I was elected by my peers to STFM’s Steering Committee for Predoctoral Education in 2005. This year, I am serving as Chair of that committee. I am also personally spearheading a multifaceted “Faculty with Young Children” initiative within STFM to improve the conference experience for student, resident, and faculty attendees with young families.

As an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at Brown Medical School, I will continue my extensive involvement in the formal and informal medical school curriculum for students at all levels including the Family Medicine Clerkship and key Family Medicine and maternal-child health electives. I also plan to pursue more international medical education and maternal-child health experiences over the next several years.