MCW 2025 Innovations in Healthcare Education Research (IHER) Conference

Keynote Address | Tuesday, September 16
LCME Accreditation: One Eye on the Horizon and the Other Close to Home

Veronica Catanese received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College, MD degree from the NYU School of Medicine, and MBA degree from NYU’s Stern School of Business. After residency training in internal medicine and a clinical fellowship in endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism at NYU, she spent two years as a research fellow at the Joslin Diabetes Center of Harvard Medical School. She then returned to NYU as a faculty member in the departments of medicine and of cell biology, eventually becoming the medical school’s senior associate dean for education and student affairs.

In 2008, Dr. Catanese joined the founding team of the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra Northwell, where she served as vice dean, dean for academic affairs, and principal business officer. In 2016, Dr. Catanese assumed the position of Co-Secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and Senior Director, Accreditation Services, at the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Throughout her professional life, Dr. Catanese has maintained a visible national profile in academic medicine, having served as president of the American Federation for Medical Research and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Investigative Medicine. She also has served as a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Clinical Research Roundtable, co-chair of the training subcommittee of the NIH Clinical Research Roadmap working group, and chair of an NIH biotechnology transfer study section.

Keynote Address | Wednesday, September 17
Teaching in the AI Era: Trust, Threat, and Transformation

Dr. Amrit Kirpalani is an assistant professor of paediatrics at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, where he spearheads innovations in medical education scholarship. After completing a paediatric nephrology fellowship at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and earning a Master in Education from Johns Hopkins University, he has dedicated his career to fostering inquiry based learning and inclusive training across both undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

His research centers on technology enhanced learning - leveraging artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and social media to break down barriers to higher education, build accessible tools, and mine large scale usage data for rigorous, equity driven insights that continually refine curriculum design. With numerous peer reviewed publications and national and international media coverage on AI in medicine, he is also the founder of the Canadian Medical Student Research Competition, a national showcase celebrating the scholarship and creativity of tomorrow’s physicians.

Keynote Address | Thursday, September 18
Leading Medical Education Teams Through Crisis

Dr. Kathlyn Fletcher is a professor in the department of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center. She has served as the medicine residency program director for the past eight years.

She received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from DePauw University, graduating summa cum laude in 1992. She then attended medical school at the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine, where she graduated with Honors in 1996. She stayed at the University of Chicago Hospitals for Internal Medicine residency training and served as a chief resident at MacNeal Hospital, a community hospital in Berwyn IL. She completed a health services research fellowship at the University of Michigan in the Robert Wood Johnson/VA Clinical Scholars Program. While there, she received an MA in Higher Education Administration from the UM School of Education. She joined the faculty of the MCW in 2003. Clinically, Dr. Fletcher is a hospitalist at the Zablocki VA and Froedtert Hospital.

In Dr. Fletcher’s early career, she was a clinician-researcher. She was funded by VA HSRD, the ACGME and AHRQ. The focus of Dr. Fletcher’s research was the intersection between graduate medical education and patient care. She studied issues such as patient perceptions of bedside rounds, the impact of discontinuity on patient outcomes, hand-offs of care, and how to measure the workload of physicians. She has published more than 100 papers on these topics, including in journals such as JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of Graduate Medical Education, and BMJ Quality and Safety. Her most current work explores the care of hospitalized medical patients who have PTSD as a comorbidity. Dr. Fletcher collaborated on two books that featured essays about caring and character during and after the pandemic. Her new book is Leading Through Crisis: Intimate Stories of Teamwork, Character, and Caring in Graduate Medical Education which was published in November 2024.

At home, she has three teenaged children and a husband. She also has two dogs that give her unconditional positive regard, balancing out the three teenagers. She loves watching sports, especially the Brewers, the Cubs, and the Bucks. She also loves being outside, especially in quiet, beautiful places.