Faculty

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Harvard Medical School

  • Shelley Carson, PhD, Author; Associate in Psychology, Harvard University

    Dr. Carson is the author of the award-winning books Your Creative Brain (Jossey- Bass) and Almost Depressed (co-authored with Jefferson Prince, MD: Hazelden). She teaches and conducts research at Harvard where she has won teaching awards for her course "Creativity: Madmen, Geniuses and Harvard Students." In addition to numerous publications in peer-reviewed science journals, her work has been featured on CNN, the Discovery Channel, BBC, and NPR. She blogs at Psychology Today and The Huffington Post. 
  • Jeremy Samuel Faust, MD, MS, Instructor in Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School

    Jeremy Samuel Faust, MD, MS, MA, is an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. He is the cohost of FOAMcast, an award-winning free medical education podcast bridging core emergency medicine content with cutting-edge topics, which has been downloaded nearly 2 million times. He is a frequent contributor to Slate, has published essays in the New York Times, The New York Daily News, and Mother Jones and has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC) and The Takeaway (Public Radio International/WNYC/WGBH). He serves on the editorial board of the Annals of Emergency Medicine and ACEP Now and has served as a content editor for the New England Journal of Medicine Resident 360 Series.
  • Ali S. Raja, MD, MBA, MPH, Author, social media expert; Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine

    Dr. Raja is the Executive Vice Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an expert on the use of social media for academic collaboration, career development, and advocacy. He has over 200 academic publications and book chapters, almost 30,000 Twitter followers, and is the author of the Junior Medical Detective children's book series. Ali also sits on a number of editorial boards, is a frequent TV, print, and online media contributor, and has written for publications ranging from the New England Journal of Medicine to Time.
  • Elizabeth Rider, MSW, MD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and narrative writing expert

    Dr. Rider is a pediatrician, the Director of Academic Programs for the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice at Boston Children’s Hospital, and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She created and directs the faculty education fellowship in medical humanism and professionalism and the faculty fellowship for leaders in interprofessional education, and leads the International Charter for Human Values in Healthcare global initiative. Dr. Rider is an expert on narrative medical writing and senior author of the book A Practical Guide to Teaching and Assessing the ACGME Core Competencies. She is a successful course graduate who has won multiple teaching and writing awards. Dr. Rider is an associate editor for the journals Patient Education and Counseling and Medical Encounter, and serves on the editorial boards of several other journals. Her narratives have appeared in BMJ, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Academic Emergency Medicine, Medical Encounter, and other publications.
  • Julie Silver, MD, Course Director; Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Harvard Medical School, Spaulding Rehabilitation Network, Massachustts General Hospital, and Brigham and Women's Hospital

    As a social entrepreneur committed to improving healthcare for underserved populations, Dr. Silver founded a start-up company and developed a best practices model for cancer rehabilitation care that hundreds of U.S. hospitals adopted, and this was featured on the Discovery Channel’s TV show Innovations. Recently, Dr. Silver’s work has focused on the mission and values of healthcare leaders, physician burnout and improving disparities in the medical workforce. Her work is focused on high-impact strategic initiatives aimed at supporting rapid healthcare change, and teaching other healthcare professionals to lead them as well. Dr. Silver has been published in many high impact journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA network publications. She has written and edited numerous books and is formerly the Chief Editor of Books for Harvard Health Publications—the official publishing division for Harvard Medical School. Dr. Silver has received many awards, including the Boston Globe’s Top Innovator in Medicine, and has been featured in hundreds of media outlets, including The New York Times, The London Times, and NPR. Dr. Silver is currently affiliated with Spaulding Rehabilitation, Massachusetts General, and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals.
  • Michael S. Sinha, MD, JD, MPH, Policy expert and writer; Fellow, Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science

    Dr. Sinha is a Center for Regulatory Science Fellow in the new Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science, within the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science (HiTS) at Harvard Medical School. He is also affiliated with the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), within the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he obtained his MD and JD degrees at Southern Illinois University and an MPH at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is active in organized medicine as a member of the American Medical Association and the Massachusetts Medical Society and trained in internal medicine at Yale-Griffin Hospital and Boston Medical Center. His legal scholarship includes articles in the American Journal of Legal Medicine, the American Journal of Law and Medicine, the Harvard Law & Policy Review and the Food and Drug Law Journal. Medical publications have appeared in JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, CHEST, PLOS Medicine, the American Journal of Bioethics, and the Health Affairs Blog. You can also find Dr. Sinha on Twitter supporting #HarvardWriters2019 and #HeForShe #WomenInMedicine: @DrSinhaEsq

Guest Faculty

  • Susan Aiello, DVM, ELS, Writing instructor, and Past President, Board of Editors in the Life Sciences

    Dr. Aiello is an award-winning writing instructor and professional, BELS-Certified editor who has nearly 30 years of experience in medical publishing. She has extensive teaching experience in training health writers, including ESL authors—those who are writing in English as a second language. She has made multiple appearances on national television and radio. In addition to her medical background, she has studied journalism and publication management and is a board-certified editor in the life sciences. Her editorial and training style encourages collaborative book development. She is a former Editor-in-Chief of The Merck Veterinary Manual and has edited numerous other professional medical reference works and trade nonfiction health books.
  • Rana Lee Adawi Awdish, MD, FCCP, FACP, Author; Director, Pulmonary Hypertension Program, Henry Ford Hospital; Medical Director, Care Experience, Henry Ford Health System; Assistant Professor, Wayne State University School of Medicine

    Rana Awdish, MD, FCCP FACP is the author of In Shock, a critically acclaimed, best-selling memoir based on her own critical illness. A critical care physician and faculty member of Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan, she completed her medical degree at Wayne State in 2002 where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society, her residency at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York, and her fellowship training at Henry Ford Hospital where she serves as the current Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program. She also serves as the Medical Director of Care Experience for the Health System. 

    Her memoir has been integrated into graduate medical education courses across the US and Europe, and was reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She lectures to physicians, health care leaders and medical schools across the country. She was named Henry Ford Hospital’s Critical Care Teacher of the Year in 2016. In 2017, she was named the National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year by The Schwartz Center as well as Press Ganey's Physician of the Year. She has been interviewed by The Times, The Telegraph, The BBC, and NPR. Her writing has appeared in the Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine, where her Perspectives article, "A View from the Edge," went viral—garnering over 120,000 views—and is ranked in the 99th percentile for reach. Her book has been translated into nine languages including German, Polish and Portuguese. 
  • Regina Brooks, Literary agent, Serendipity Literary Agency

    Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency, based in New York City and Los Angeles, which Writer's Digest magazine named as one of the top 25 literary agencies. Her agency has represented and established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. She has held senior editorial positions at John Wiley and Sons and McGraw-Hill companies. Brooks is the author of the titles Writing Great Books for Young Adults (Source Books); You Should Really Write a Book: How to Write, Sell and Market Your Memoir (St. Martin’s Press); and the forthcoming title, Three Whispers and a Shout. She has been highlighted in global media and TV outlets including ABC News, CW, Forbes, Poets and Writers, Publishers Weekly, The Writer, Mediabistro, Essence, Ebony, Writers Digest magazine, Uptown magazine, and Rolling Out. She was named Woman of the Year by the National Association of Professional Women. She is a pilot, a member of the Association of Writer Representatives, Authors Guild,  and New York Women in Film and Television, and on the board of the National Book Foundation’s Junior Committee.
  • Dana Corriel, MD, Social media expert; Founder, @SoMeDocs

    Dana Corriel, MD is a board-certified internist in Pearl River, NY, and a healthcare social media influencer. She received the recognition of being one of Top Ten Internists to Follow on Twitter in 2018 by Medical Economics and was voted as a Top Doctor in her area by her peers, for both 2017 & 2018. Dr. Corriel has appeared on the front page of the LA Times, Gastro & Endo News, and most recently, EP Digest, garnering attention for her effective use of social media. She founded SoMeDocs (short for Doctors on Social Media), a group that empowers physicians & teaches them how to connect with their target audience using effective virtual tools, and has grown the platforms significantly over the course of only two years. She lectures on the power of social media use in medicine and the power of creativity in both medical innovation and physician wellness. Dr. Corriel is also curating a compilation of short non-fiction essays and is contributing to several ongoing projects that involve improvement of physician health and content dissemination. You can find Dr. Corriel's work across social media platforms, using both the @drcorriel and @SoMeDocs handles.
  • Linda Girgis, MD, FAAFP, Author, social media expert

    Dr. Girgis is a dedicated family physician in private practice in South River, New Jersey and its surrounding communities. Holding board certification from the American Board of Family Medicine, Dr. Girgis is affiliated with both St. Peter’s University and Raritan Bay Hospitals and also collaborates closely with several universities and medical schools, where she teaches medical students and residents. She is a clinical assistant professor at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.  Because of her commitment to excellence, Dr. Girgis has earned awards and recognition from her peers and a variety of industry bodies, including: most nominated Health IT Change Agent of 2015 by Health IT Outcomes; named one of the top 10 doctors to follow on Twitter by Compass Healthcare Redefined, October 2015; named one of the top 100 healthcare influencers by HealthJoy, September 2015; named one of the 10 doctors that others follow on twitter by MDigital Life February 2016; named one of the top 5 Women in Healthcare blogs in 2016 by Live Clinic. She is an Advisory Board member for SERMO; a board member of Protect the Pecs Foundation as well as a medical advisory board member for Practicing Physicians for America. Additionally, she is a blogger for Physician’s Weekly, Physicians Practice and MedicalPractice Insider, as well as a guest columnist for Medcity News, PM360 and Health IT Outcomes. She has published articles in several other media outlets. Dr. Girgis has written four books: Inside Our Broken Healthcare System; The War on Doctors; The Healthcare Apocalypse; and Pandemic Rising. She has been interviewed in US News, on NBC Nightly News, and in many other media outlets.
  • Jill Grimes, MD, Author and pitch coach

    Dr. Jill Grimes is a board-certified family physician practicing in Austin, Texas. She is passionate about preventative medicine and patient education. In keeping with that aspiration, Dr. Grimes wrote Seductive Delusions: How Everyday People Catch STDs, hoping a different style of education—stories, not just statistics—might help to lower the shockingly high rate of sexually transmittable diseases in the United States today. Seductive Delusions has been a part of the freshman health literacy curriculum in Texas high schools since 2010.  Dr. Grimes was a National Merit and President's Endowed Scholar at Texas A&M University, graduating in 1987. She received her medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine, and completed her family medicine residency training in Austin, Texas. Dr. Grimes maintained a private practice for twenty years, and is now exclusively seeing patients at the University of Texas in their Urgent Care Department.  Dr. Grimes joined the UMass medical school faculty as a clinical instructor in 2000, through an innovative internet-based ethics course that connected medical students with practicing family doctors across the country. In 2006, Dr. Grimes became a contributing author and member of the editorial board for The 5-Minute Clinical Consult textbook, and then served as an associate editor for the 2010-2015 editions.
  • John Hanc, Author, journalist, educator

    As a writer or co-author, John Hanc has 16 books to his credit, including six memoirs—the most recent of which, Your Heart, My Hands by cardiac surgeon Arun Singh, MD, was published in early 2019 by Center Books, an imprint of Hachette. Hanc’s books also included the award-winning memoirs The Coolest Race on Earth, about his participation in the Antarctica Marathon; and Not Dead Yet, the story of diabetic cyclist and Team Type 1 founder Phil Southerland; as well as the popular self-help book Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life, co-written with Margaret Moore and Dr. Paul Hammerness. A long-time journalist, Hanc is a contributing writer to The New York Times, Newsday and Smithsonian.com. He is also an Associate Professor at the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, where he teaches journalism and communications.
  • Paula Christian Kliger, PhD, ABPP, Psychologist, author, and pitch coach

    Dr. Kliger is a Diplomate, Board Certified in Clinical Psychology, American Board of Professional Psychology. Resolving trauma, internal strife, suffering and interpersonal conflict first within one’s self to bridge the gap to others serves as the cornerstone of Dr. Paula Christian Kliger’s new book, Power Your Heart…You Power Your Mind. As a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and organizational consultant, Dr. Kliger’s approach is complex, and yet simple because she uses non-traditional tools to reach her reader. Utilizing her own artwork to stimulate emotion within individuals and groups, she delves into a dynamic and humanistic self-study model to ignite a process of personal mastery and a shift of mind that inspires transformative growth, depth, capacity, and flexibility.
  • Tiffany Love, PhD, APRN, FACHE, Social media expert

    Dr. Love is the Regional Chief Nursing Officer for Coastal Healthcare Alliance overseeing Pen Bay Medical Center and Waldo County General Hospital. Love is a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives and serves as faculty and coordinator of numerous continuing education offerings, a member of the Management Series Editorial Board and has served as an officer, director for district 4, and committee chair of the Louisiana chapter. Dr. Love serves as a national keynote speaker for many prestigious conferences and as faculty for the Harvard Career Advancement and Leadership Skills for Women in Healthcare CME. 
  • Martha W. Murphy, Writing and book proposal coach, platform development designer

    Martha Murphy is an award-winning writer, editor, and marketing professional. She has written, co-written, or developed 27 books. She is interested in a range of topics including health, self-help, how-to, cookbooks, and memoir. In addition to assisting aspiring writers with book proposals, book manuscripts, magazine articles, platform, and agent acquisition, she has designed successful promotion campaigns, including landing a new author on Good Morning America. With her help, new writers have found representation with top agents and been published by major houses including Berkley Books, Doubleday, Page Street, St. Martin’s Press, Penguin, Hachette, Amacom, Hazelden, and Johns Hopkins University Press. Her in-depth knowledge of the publishing world and expertise as a professional writer have helped her clients write books that have won national awards and attracted the attention of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and National Public Radio.
  • Diane Radford, MD, FACS, FRCSEd, Author, social media expert, and pitch coach

    Diane Radford is an Associate Professor of Surgery, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, Staff Breast Surgical Oncologist with the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, and Director of the Breast Program at Cleveland Clinic Hillcrest Hospital. Her peers have recognized her as a Best Doctor for over 20 consecutive years as well as a Top Doctor nationally. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and textbook chapters. Her creative writing contributions have been published in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Living Like a Lady When You Have Cancer, Catch That Look: Living, Laughing & Loving Despite Triple-Negative Breast Cancer, On the Wings of Pink Angels, Mother Knows Better, and the New You magazine. Her essay collection, Bless Your Little Cotton Socks: Beyond the Quirky Sayings of my Eccentric Scottish Mum, was published in January 2017. Active on social media since 2011, she has lectured nationally on social media for health care professionals. Dr. Radford has served as a pitch coach at this course annually since 2013. She serves on the Editorial Board of the Annals of Surgical Oncology, Multi-Media section, and has co-authored a guide for other members of the board on how to use Twitter. Her Twitter followers number over 14,500.
  • Rusty Shelton, Publicist and social media expert, CEO of Zilker Media

    Rusty Shelton first spoke at this course on the changing world of PR and marketing at the age of 23. He is the co-author (alongside Adam Witty) of Authority Marketing: How to Leverage 7 Pillars of Thought Leadership to Make Competition Irrelevant (ForbesBooks, 2018), with a foreword from Steve Forbes, and co-author (alongside Barbara Cave Henricks) of Mastering the New Media Landscape: Embrace the Micromedia Mindset (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), which is endorsed by David Meerman Scott, Tom Rath, Sally Hogshead and many others. Rusty’s commentary on branding and PR has been featured in Inc. Magazine, Forbes, the BBC, and many other top media outlets. He is the CEO of Zilker Media, one of the country's most respected marketing & PR agencies, co-founder of Catch Engine, a leading quiz marketing software platform and Publisher of ForbesBooks. Rusty has led campaigns for more than 30 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers and works with many of the world's leading thought leaders and brands.
  • Lisa Tener, MS, Book writing coach, book proposal coach and author

    Lisa Tener is a published author and award-winning book coach. Her posts on writing and publishing can be found on The Huffington Post, Business Journals, Thrive Global, Writer's Digest and on many top publishing industry blogs.  A graduate of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Lisa specializes in helping doctors, therapists, and other healing professionals write and publish compelling books and successful book proposals in many genres including health, how-to and self-help. Her clients are published by a diversity of publishers including Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, New Harbinger, Beyond Words, New World Library, Johns Hopkins University Press, Yale University Press, and dozens of others. Many of her clients have won prestigious awards including three Nautilus Book Awards in 2014, multiple Stevie Awards, Moms Choice Awards and independent book awards. The authors she has worked with have appeared on Oprah, the Discovery Channel, NPR’s Fresh Air, Good Morning America, CBS's Early Show and appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and much more. Her Bring Your Book to Life® program won the Silver Stevie Award for Best New Service of the Year—Media and she also was awarded a Silver Stevie for Mentor/Coach of the Year.
  • Lauren Westafer, DO, MPH, MS, Clinical Instructor, University of Massachusetts Medical School at Baystate Medical Center

    Lauren M. Westafer, DO, MPH, MS, is faculty in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School - Baystate. Dr. Westafer helped found the Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAM) movement, blogs at The Short Coat, and is co-host of the free, open-access emergency medicine core content podcast, FOAMcast. Her academic interests include knowledge translation and she is funded by the NHLBI to conduct research on the implementation of evidence-based approaches to the diagnosis of pulmonary embolism.

Agents, Editors and Social Media Experts

  • Lisa Akoury-Ross, Independent Publisher & Publishing Consultant, SDP Publishing Solutions
  • Debbie Carvalko, Senior Acquisitions Editor, ABC-CLIO
  • Karen Chernyaev, Editor and writer
  • Leigh Devine, Editorial Director, MedscapeTV/WebMD
  • Don Fehr, Literary agent, Trident Media
  • Marissa Giambelluca, Acquisitions and Editorial Manager, Page Street Publishing Company
  • Tracy Hart, LICSW, Editor and writing coach
  • Linda Konner, Literary agent, The Linda Konner Literary Agency
  • Albert LaFarge, PhD, Literary agent, Albert LaFarge Literary Agency
  • John Maas, Literary agent, Sterling Lord Literistic
  • Ginger Moran, PhD, Book coach, author; Retired faculty, University of Virginia
  • Umbereen Nehal, MD, MPH, Social media expert
  • Liz Neporent, Managing Editor, WebMD/Medscape
  • Joe Rusko, Health & Wellness Editor, Johns Hopkins University Press
  • Ritu Thamman, MD, Social Media Strategist for American Society of Echocardiography and Social Media Editor @CircOutcomes and @JournalASEcho
  • Jean E. Thomson Black, PhD, Senior Executive Editor, Science & Medicine, Yale University Press
  • Melissa Welby, MD, Social media expert