Carol Ann B. Diachun, MD, MSEd

I am truly honored to work for this Society as a Member of the Board of Directors. I cannot imagine my career as an educator, associate residency program director and now program director and associate chair for education without SEA. This Society has provided me with the tools for teaching and evaluating my residents as well as numerous opportunities for my own professional development. Through SEA I have developed a network of colleagues, mentors and good friends. The excitement and enthusiasm for education is literally infectious at our meetings. Since joining SEA more than a decade ago, I have been heavily involved in this community.

My dearest mentor, Dr. Denham Ward, encouraged my passion in education fostered my work in committees at SEA, including sponsoring me at SEA’s Teaching Workshop many years ago. These opportunities only spurred me to become an even better educator. I completed a Dean’s Teaching Fellowship at the University of Rochester and graduated with my Masters of Science in Health Professions Education in fall 2014 from the Warner School of Education. In 2014, I moved to become Residency Program Director and Associate Chair for Education at the University of Florida – Jacksonville. In this role I have used many of the ideas and innovations I learnt through SEA to redesign our entire program to incorporate a flipped classroom model, active learning and reflective practice - both from a viewpoint of the residency as well as faculty development.

Since 2004 I have contributed numerous workshops and posters at SEA. I have also been actively involved in committee work. With the Committee on Faculty Development, I helped organize the initial Educator’s Portal for the SEA website and was one of the original Peer Teaching Coaches for our Society. I have continued to actively provide feedback to workshop presenters in this role.

Some of the most challenging work I have done for SEA was as the Program Director for our highly innovative June 2013 SEA national meeting,” Milestones & Assessment: Are You Ready?” The meeting utilized 36 workshops to teach about Milestones and provided a collaborative environment in which participants designed over 50 assessment products addressing Milestones that are available to all SEA members via the SEA website. This meeting was the highest-attended spring meeting for SEA and was accomplished during a period when the Society’s management was in transition.

Since 2012 I have also served as Chair and Chair-designee of the Educational Meetings Committee. During this time, we have had many highly successful and innovative meetings. We created a peer-review process for the meeting workshop submissions process improving quality; we incorporated the AAMC MERC workshops in 2012 and 2014; we designed a huge collaborative effort with the Milestones workshops in 2013 and we shared ideas with our surgical colleagues in the first-ever combined meeting with the Association of Surgical Educators in 2015 in Seattle. These all reflect my inherent belief in innovation and collaboration. With hard work and the willingness to try, together we can accomplish so many things.