Donna Windish, MD, MPH, professor of medicine (general medicine), has been named associate chair, Educational Scholarship, effective immediately.
This new associate chair position was created to have a member of the leadership team specifically focused on expanding mentorship and scholarship opportunities for clinician educators within the Department of Internal Medicine. Windish was a natural choice for the role.
Windish received her medical degree from the University of Connecticut and her Master of Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She joined our faculty as an instructor in 2005. She initially served as the site director of the Yale Medical Student Inpatient Medicine Clerkship Rotation for Internal Medicine at Waterbury Hospital. She was subsequently appointed as the associate program director for the Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency Program, a position she held for six years. In 2013, Windish became program director for the Yale-Waterbury Internal Medicine Residency Program.
In 2016, she designed and launched the Yale General Internal Medicine’s Medical Education Fellowship Program. Its goal is to train junior faculty to become future leaders in medical education through training experiences in teaching skills, curriculum development, and research. In response to faculty comments and suggestions collected using a needs-assessment survey, Windish created, in 2019, the Advancement of Clinician-Educator Scholarship (ACES) Faculty Development Program, The one-year program provides uses a dedicated curriculum and personalized mentoring sessions to equip clinician-educators with the knowledge and skills they will use to create scholarly work in their field of interest. ACES has graduated 21 junior faculty to date.
“Donna’s dedication to educational scholarship within the department is exceptional,” said Department Chair Gary V. Désir, MD, Paul B. Beeson Professor of Medicine and Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity. “She has created not one, but two programs designed to foster the development of junior faculty.”
Windish is excited to provide additional educational mentoring to department faculty, through hosting various in-person events, the creation of online tools, and expanding existing programs created by Associate Chair, Education and Academic Affairs, Dana Dunne, MD, MHS.
“We'd like to develop an academy to foster a culture of excellence in teaching and education and educational scholarship. And we have some of the components already through our Friday noon meetings [IM]Educators program. If we can organize more activities to provide mentoring, advocacy, and support for research, scholarship, and teaching, that would be a great boost to the department and for the clinician educators that we serve,” said Windish.
The Department of Internal Medicine at Yale is among the nation's premier departments, bringing together an elite cadre of clinicians, investigators, educators, and staff in one of the world's top medical schools. To learn more, visit Internal Medicine.