Samuel Buck, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine and director of medical student simulation, was awarded the Early Career Educator Award by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare’s Emergency Medicine Section. The award was announced at the 2024 International Meeting for Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH) in late January. Buck is a team member of the Yale Center for Healthcare Simulation, which provides a safe space for learning, where mistakes can be a learning tool, for medical students, physician associate students, and residents.

Buck has demonstrated his passion and dedication to the field of medical simulation since, as a first-year medical student at Baylor College of Medicine, he led a group of fellow first-year students to national and international simulation competition championships. He also founded a simulation interest group at Baylor, which sparked several other Texas medical schools to do the same and created a regional medical student simulation consortium.

In residency at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), Buck was integral in the development and implementation of an innovative, virtual simulation rotation for students who were unable to enter clinical rotations during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a new member of the YSM faculty, he continued to innovate by designing and administrating a novel, longitudinal simulation curriculum for the pre-clerkship medical students, starting in their first week of courses. This large-scale project already has led to over 200 YSM MD students participating in more than a dozen team-based simulation cases and is a highlight of the students' 18-month pre-clerkship curriculum.

Buck was part of an R01 grant from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to create an innovative, adaptable virtual simulation platform to simulate rapidly changing emergency department triage processes and presented an interactive workshop at IMSH on designing and advocating for more simulation for medical students. Buck continues to grow as a faculty member and director of medical student simulation, demonstrating his passion for simulation in medical education through his work with students, who have described him as “friendly, enthusiastic, encouraging, and instructive,” and as someone who creates “a safe space [which] allows for great discussion.”