"Penn’s unique focus on making radiologists part of their hospital system and their medical community certainly has molded me into the radiologist that I am today."
Where are you from?
I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, a suburban town in southwestern Connecticut. My father was a radiologist, and, in fact, himself was a Penn Radiology Resident! After attending UPenn for undergrad, I came back to Connecticut for medical school at Yale. After that, it was back to Philadelphia for my residency.
What did you do after graduation?
I actually stayed at Penn for five years. During my 4th year at Penn Medicine I began the Oncologic Imaging and Informatics Fellowships, where I spent my 4th year doing both a modified body fellowship and the Imaging Informatics Fellowship. Then I did a full year of Nuclear Radiology during my traditional “fellow” year.
I moved back to Connecticut after fellowship to join a private practice based in Bridgeport, where we cover two hospitals with two separate fellowship programs and have a number of outpatient offices. I am currently working my way up to partner, and am involved in a number of initiatives in the practice, including as a member of our Standards Committee, building our Lung Screening and Prostate MRI programs, and analyzing and overseeing a number of IT and AI projects.
At the state level, I am currently the only Young and Early Career Physician (YPS) member to be on the Rad Society of Connecticut’s Executive Board, where I help run the state society, serve as an Alternate Councilor to the ACR, have helped get the state’s Resident and Fellow Section up and running, and stay on top of the local and state political issues facing us and our patients. On a national level, I am currently The ACR YPS Membership Liaison, serving on the Executive Committee to make sure we get (and keep) young radiologists fresh out of training involved in issues ranging from reimbursement to government relations to informatics and AI to education. I’ve also served on several ACR committees, including the Informatics Advisory Committee wonderfully run by fellow Penn Radiology grad Howard Chen, and formerly the Patient and Family Centered Care Committee. In the Society for Informatics in Imaging and Medicine (SIIM), I co-chair the annual Innovation Challenge with my good friend and former Penn co-resident Ram Chadalavada.
Why should an applicant choose Penn Radiology?
When choosing a program, you need to decide on several things: clinical excellence, location, people, and opportunity.
Clinically, Penn’s education is top notch. You learn from some of the best radiologists in the country who are not just on top of, but are actively creating, new advanced imaging techniques, are pioneering new cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, and have an amazing reputation. But you can get that at a lot of other top notch residency programs, so why Penn?
The people at a residency make a huge difference, and with regards to your education, Mary Scanlon is the best program director out there. Full stop. She endlessly advocates for her residents, making sure they are heard by the department and hospital, and creating opportunities to be involved in organized radiology. One of the biggest reasons I was able to be so involved in the ACR and my state society is that Mary made sure I had the time and resources to get involved as a resident, and she fostered that interest in organized medicine to make sure I became a leader at the state and national level.
Mary creates opportunities for her residents like no one else. As part of the first class to be thrust into the new board structure, Mary made sure that the program was prepared for such a drastic change by having several one-year mini fellowships and two-year combined programs ready to go for us. I took advantage of the Oncologic Imaging pathway, and Mary, along with Mark Rosen, Dave Mankoff, and Jake Dubroff, really allowed me to make the program my own. They gave me the freedom and flexibility to spend more time around the hospital, like spending a few weeks working with oncologists and radiation oncologists, and made the experience something uniquely “Penn” that has shaped me as a doctor.
But beyond Mary, there are so many fantastic people at Penn that made residency a special experience. Tessa Cook is an amazing friend and mentor. She is endlessly productive, a national leader in informatics even at a young age, and helps and pushes her informatics trainees to be at the forefront of the national imaging informatics community. The nuclear medicine division is filled with terrific teachers and mentors like David Mankoff, Jacob Dubroff, Dan Pryma, and Austin Pantel. In the body division, people like Jill Langer and Mark Rosen are leaders in their field and are joys to work with. People like Lisa Jones are top notch educators. And I still, to this day, when reading an abdominal MRI, think to myself “What would Evan Siegelman say about this?” These people, and many more, have all profoundly impacted me and have made me into the doctor I am today.
There is also a real sense of community with your co-residents. Some of them remain, to this day, some of my closest friends. Penn Radiology does an amazing job selecting people who aren’t just good doctors, but are people that FIT the system at Penn. They create a wonderful team of good people who can enjoy each other as much at work as they can outside of it.
As you can probably surmise from my short resume above, my entire life has been a back and forth between Connecticut and Philadelphia, and Philly will always have a very special place in my heart. It is my second home. It is a wonderful city filled with wonderful people, with great food and culture, and a superb quality of life. To myself, and to my wife, it was the perfect place to spend our late-20’s and early 30’s. It is an affordable, vibrant, and diverse place perfect for everyone from single residents to those with partners with or without kids.
What is your favorite memory from residency?
Beyond all the happy hours and dinners with my friends, one of my favorite memories is the yearly welcome BBQ’s at Mary’s house. Getting to know the new first years, and getting to hang out and swim with all my co-residents and friends was always a special time.
One of my favorite memories clinically was attending liver conferences on Fridays, usually with Evan Siegelman or Mark Rosen, as well as body fellows and colleagues from IR. The conference was a master course in radiologists can drive the tumor board format, and has had a profound impact in how I interact with my non-radiology clinical colleagues to this day. During my Oncologic Imaging Fellowship, my attendings and mentors pushed me to attend more tumor boards to become a presence in the hospital, a skill that was maybe as important as anything else I did in training. Penn’s unique focus on making radiologists part of their hospital system and their medical community certainly has molded me into the radiologist that I am today.
Describe anything else unique about your Penn Radiology training.
I think that more than any other program, Penn Medicine prides itself not just on training radiologists, but on training whole doctors.
The Penn experience integrated residents not just within the department among attendings, fellows, techs, and PAs, but also with doctors from around the hospital. The attendings always stressed delving into the patient’s medical record, learning not just from the images but from the patient’s whole story, and from the clinical notes our colleagues in other departments left for us.
I think Penn taught me to be an excellent doctor and member of my medical community, and not just a faceless name in a dark room behind a computer screen.