Individuals who are appointed to serve on ABIM boards or committees are expected to have ABIM's mission as their primary interest when contributing to ABIM's work and therefore must adhere to our policies.
Robert O. Roswell, MD, FACP, FACC, Chair
Dr. Roswell is a leader in advancing equity and inclusion in medicine, including influential studies and talks focused on improving clinical decision-making skills to advance health equity.
As Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Professor of Cardiology and Science Education, he oversees recruitment initiatives, pipeline programs and innovative and enhanced medical curricula to build towards health equity and inclusion at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.
Dr. Roswell received his certification as a Health Care Executive for Diversity and Inclusion from the Association of American Medical Colleges. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine and chaired its inaugural Equity Committee. He was the inaugural co-chair of the Critical Care Cardiology member section of the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and is a member of ACC’s Health Equity Committee.
As a Co-Director of the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Lenox Hill Hospital, Northwell Health, in New York City, he is devoted to providing high-quality, acute cardiac care to patients with cultural humility. Dr. Roswell’s educational and clinical areas of focus are cardiac arrest, cardiogenic shock and acute cardiovascular care.
His medical degree was conferred with honors from New York University School of Medicine where he completed residency and chief residency. He went on to cardiology fellowship at Georgetown University School of Medicine/Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. He is ABIM Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease.
As of May 2025, Dr. Roswell reported no external relationships.
Krisda H. Chaiyachati, MD, MPH, MSHP, FACP, Chair-Elect
Dr. Chaiyachati is the National Medical Director for Clinical Transformation at Ascension, the largest nonprofit health system in the United States with more than 2600 sites of care and more than 130 hospitals across 20 states. In this role, he leads the strategic vision and operational implementation of national programs to transform clinical care, including initiatives to improve patient engagement, clinical workflow and consumer experiences by leveraging advances in new technology, virtual care and remote patient monitoring.
Most recently, Dr. Chaiyachati had leadership roles at Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., as the Senior Medical Director for Care Delivery and the Physician Lead for Value-Based Care and Innovation. He also cofounded the Health Equity Center of Excellence. Prior to Verily, he held leadership roles at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, notably as the founding Medical Director for Penn Medicine OnDemand Virtual Care and PennOpen Pass, and the inaugural Director for the Leonard Davis Institute-Penn Medicine Research Laboratory.
He is an expert on how to design, implement and evaluate strategies that improve equity, efficiency and access to care through transformative digital health initiatives. While in academia, through funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institutes of Health and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, Dr. Chaiyachati developed and evaluated technology-facilitated interventions to improve equitable access to care and automate care delivery processes. His peer-reviewed research has been covered in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he has articles-of-the-year awards from AcademyHealth, Telemedicine and e-Health, and Annals of Internal Medicine. For his work, he has been awarded Penn’s Division of General Internal Medicine Excellence in Innovation in Clinical Practice Award and the Society of General Internal Medicine Quality & Practice Innovation Award.
Dr. Chaiyachati earned his medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School and completed residency and chief residency through the Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine program. He has a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as a Zuckerman Fellow. He has a Master of Science in Health Policy from the University of Pennsylvania where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar. He has adjunct appointments within the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He is a member of Intend Health Strategies’ Board of Directors, and ABIM Board Certified in Internal Medicine as a practicing general internist at the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
As of October 2024, Dr. Chaiyachati reported the following external relationships:
Work as an author or editor for following company, with compensation as listed:
- Cambridge University Press, receiving compensation as an author for Seemed Like a Good Idea: Alchemy versus Evidence-Based Approaches to Healthcare Management Innovation.
Dr. Chaiyachati serves in significant roles with the following organizations, receiving reimbursement or compensation as listed:
- The American Telemedicine Association, chief executive officer, Advisory Committee for Eliminating Health Disparities, without compensation.
- Intend Health Strategies, without compensation.
Dr. Chaiyachati works full-time at Ascension Health as the National Medical Director for Clinical Transformation.
Megan M. Koepke, MHA, Secretary
Ms. Koepke is a seasoned leader in both government and the private sector, leading strategy and implementation of population health and value-based care improvement across Medicare, Medicaid and commercially insured populations. She started her career as a care coordinator for a home intravenous infusion company serving patients with chronic and terminal illness, where she learned early on how right care, right place and right time are more dream than reality for many patients and their health coverage. Together with early experiences navigating care and treatment as a patient and family member, Ms. Koepke developed a true north for continuously improving the link between health policy, strategy and operations. Her areas of expertise include Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulatory and payment policy, population health, value-based care model design, strategy and operations.
Since 2017, Ms. Koepke has worked in consulting roles within the healthcare industry, serving private and public sector clients with strategy and operations to support population health, alternative payment models and patient engagement. She joined the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) in 2014 to lead the adaption and scale of alternative payment model tests of change in primary care, accountable care organizations, Medicare-Medicaid integration, Medicare Advantage and special population models. While there, she was a champion of integrating care for dual eligible populations, increasing paths to accountable care for rural communities and engaging stakeholders with on-the-ground experience in population health improvement to enhance value-based care across all programs.
Ms. Koepke earned a Master of Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
As of April 2025, Ms. Koepke reported the following external relationships:
Ms. Koepke reported that she is a founding partner of Coral Health Advisors.
C. Seth Landefeld, MD, Treasurer
Dr. Landefeld, ABIM Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Geriatric Medicine, is Professor and Chair, Department of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He serves on the UAB Health System Board of Directors and the University of Alabama Health Services Foundation Board of Directors.
Previously, Dr. Landefeld served as Chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Associate Chair for Strategic Planning in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He also served as Associate Chief of Staff for Geriatrics and Extended Care at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. He was previously Chief, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Care Research in the Department of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Landefeld practiced general internal medicine and geriatrics in his previous positions. His practice is currently limited to hospital medicine.
Dr. Landefeld has developed novel approaches to improve outcomes of seriously ill older people. He and his colleagues invented Acute Care for Elders Units and demonstrated their beneficial effects for patients, families, physicians and nurses as well as on costs of care. Previously, he served as President of the Society of General Internal Medicine and on the Board of Directors of the American Geriatrics Society. He is the 2016 Laureate, Alabama Chapter, American College of Physicians and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians.
Dr. Landefeld received a bachelor’s degree in history and science from Harvard College and his medical degree from Yale University. He also received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and theology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He completed house staff training at UCSF, where he served as chief medical resident, and fellowship training in general internal medicine and clinical epidemiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital.
As of September 2024, Dr. Landefeld reported the following external relationships:
Dr. Landefeld serves in significant roles with the following organization, receiving reimbursement or compensation as listed:
- The Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, Board Member; President, Association of Professors of Medicine, without compensation.
Furman S. McDonald, MD, MPH, President and Chief Executive Officer
Dr. McDonald, a board-certified internist, is President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the ABIM Foundation. Dr. McDonald previously served as ABIM’s Senior Vice President for Academic and Medical Affairs from 2014 to 2024. Prior to joining ABIM, Dr. McDonald served as Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine and Residency Program Director at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, one of the nation’s largest internal medicine residencies. While at the Mayo Clinic, he led the program's participation in the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s (ACGME’s) Educational Innovations Project, which investigated many concepts that would eventually become part of the Next Accreditation System. Since joining ABIM, he has continued his role in patient care and GME as an attending physician of the J. Edwin Wood Clinic and faculty of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.
As a longtime member of the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM), Dr. McDonald chaired the APDIM Survey Committee from 2007 to 2011, leading the development of longitudinally tracked surveys addressing areas of importance in GME. He was a member of the ACGME Residency Review Committee for Internal Medicine (RC-IM) during the transition to the Next Accreditation System and continued on the RC-IM as ABIM’s Ex Officio member during his tenure as SVP for Academic and Medical Affairs.
The focus of Dr. McDonald's professional career has been the training of internal medicine residents and fellows to provide better care to patients by incorporating the best evidence available for both medical care and medical education. A well-respected leader in the field of GME and medical education research, Dr. McDonald has authored more than 110 peer-reviewed publications. During his tenure as Program Director, he was recognized with the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine Diversity Champion award for his work increasing the numbers of women and those underrepresented in medicine in its residencies and fellowships. He also co-founded the Mayo International Health Program, which has subsequently funded hundreds of trainees to pursue educational rotations caring for medically underserved populations in international settings. Dr. McDonald continues to support this work.
He earned an undergraduate degree in physics with highest distinction (grade point average) and with highest honors (based on his thesis in atomic collision research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar. He went on to train as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute/National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Scholar at NIH’s Bethesda campus. He earned his medical degree from Mayo Medical School and completed an internal medicine internship on the Osler Medical Service of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He completed internal medicine residency at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where he also served as Chief Resident. He later earned a master of public health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, while working as a full-time hospitalist at the Mayo Clinic.
Dr. McDonald attained the rank of Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and is Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Having received many awards for medical education, in particular the teaching of the physical exam, in 2019, Dr. McDonald received the Alliance for Academic Medicine Special Recognition Award “…presented to an individual who has contributed most to helping the Alliance meet its mission which ‘promotes the advancement and professional development of its members who prepare the next generation of internal medicine physicians and leaders through education, research, engagement, and collaboration.’”
Dr. McDonald has been certified in Internal Medicine by ABIM continuously since 2000. In addition to being a longtime, proud member of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine and APDIM, he is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the Society of Hospital Medicine.
As of April 2025, Dr. McDonald reported the following external relationships:
Dr. McDonald worked as an author or editor for following companies, with compensation as listed below:
- The Mayo Clinic Scientific Press, receiving compensation as an author, paid to Mayo International Health Program Endowment.
George M. Abraham, MD, MPH
Dr. Abraham is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Chief of Medicine at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is ABIM Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease. He served as President of the American College of Physicians from 2021 to 2022. He is currently the Chair-Elect of the Board of Directors of the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB). He also previously served as Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Infectious Disease Board and is the Past Chair of the Board of Registration (Licensing) in Medicine. Prior to this, he served as a Trustee of the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Dr. Abraham has received several awards including the American Osteopathic Association Volunteer Faculty Award, the Outstanding Primary Care Educator Award of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the Leadership Award of the Massachusetts chapter of ACP, the John H. Clarke Leadership Award of the FSMB and the Phi Lambda Sigma honorary membership of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, among others.
He is an invited speaker locally, nationally and internationally, and has championed the cause of DEI and written extensively about the same. His research interests include hepatitis C and B, travel medicine and infection control, as well as medication safety and systems improvement. He has authored over 150 publications, abstracts and book chapters.
Dr. Abraham earned his medical degrees from the Christian Medical College & Hospital in Ludhiana, India, completed his residency and chief residency at Saint Vincent Hospital, and received his master's degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
As of September 2024, Dr. Abraham reported the following external relationships:
Dr. Abraham serves in significant roles with the following organizations, receiving reimbursement or compensation as listed:
- The Federation of State Medical Boards, Board of Directions, without compensation.
- Partners in Internal Medicine, President, employment.
Abha Agrawal, MD, FACP, FACHE
Dr. Agrawal is a transformative healthcare leader at the intersection of healthcare leadership, policy advocacy and technological innovation.
From leading financial and operational turnarounds to advancing innovative quality and safety initiatives, she has navigated complex healthcare environments in New York, Chicago and Massachusetts with a focus on measurable impact. Most recently, as President and CEO of Lawrence General Hospital in Massachusetts, she spearheaded a rapid financial recovery, secured vital public funding ($193 million) and led a historic hospital acquisition—efforts that not only stabilized a critical safety net institution but also preserved access to care and saved jobs for an entire region.
With fellowship training in clinical informatics and 25 years of practical experience in health IT, she has a deep understanding of the impact of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies in reshaping the science, practice and delivery of health care.
Dr. Agrawal also serves on the Board of Directors of the American College of Medical Quality. She is a Fulbright Specialist and recipient of numerous awards for her transformational work in health care including quality and safety, health informatics, healthcare leadership and health equity. She is also the founder of A4 Clinics, a chain of tech-enabled neurorehabilitation centers designed to address the burden of preventable disability in India. She is the editor of several books on patient safety and health IT, and the author of a personal memoir, 13 Gifts for My Son: Lessons for a Meaningful Life.
Dr. Agrawal received her medical education in India, served a residency in internal medicine at the State University of New York in Brooklyn and was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship in medical informatics at the Yale School of Medicine. She is ABIM Board Certified in Internal Medicine and certified by the American Board of Preventive Medicine in Clinical Informatics.
As of May 2025, Dr. Agrawal reported no external relationships.
M. Safwan Badr, MD
Dr. Badr is Professor and Chair of the Wayne State University (WSU) School of Medicine Department of Internal Medicine. He is also a Professor of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering, and a staff physician at the John D. Dingell VA Medical Center. Dr. Badr is ABIM Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease, Critical Care Medicine and Sleep Medicine.
Previously, Dr. Badr served as Chief, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at WSU School of Medicine (1998 – 2017), Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine (2004 – 2008), Chief Medical Officer of the Detroit Medical Center (DMC) (2008 – 2010), Board of Directors of DMC’ s Michigan Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (2013 – 2017) and Chief Medical Officer of the WSU Physician Group (2016 – 2017). He has also served on multiple national and international medical societies. Previously, he served on the Board of Directors of the American Thoracic Society.
Dr. Badr is an internationally known sleep disorders researcher and research mentor. He has mentored numerous trainees and junior faculty members who have launched successful academic careers.
Dr. Badr is invested in outstanding medical education. He was the founding Director of the WSU Sleep Medicine Fellowship program, and he teaches and mentors students, residents and fellows in multiple departments across the medical school.
A graduate of Damascus University Medical School in Syria, Dr. Badr completed a residency in internal medicine at Cook County Hospital in Chicago followed by clinical and research fellowships in pulmonary disease, critical care medicine and sleep medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In addition, he earned a Master of Business Administration at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
As of April 2025, Dr. Badr reported the following external relationships:
Work as an author or editor for the following companies, with compensation as listed:
- The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, receiving compensation as Editor-in-Chief.
- UpToDate®, receiving compensation for authorship and work as an editor relating to sleep medicine topics.
Alicia Fernandez, MD
Dr. Fernandez is Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and an ABIM Board Certified internist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, where she practices primary care medicine and attends on the medical wards. Her research is in health and healthcare disparities, with a focus on diabetes, Latino health, immigrant health and language barriers.
A member of the UCSF Academy of Medical Educators, she received the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Professorship for Humanism in Medicine (2009 – 2013). Since 2014, Dr. Fernandez has been a member of the Board of Governors of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and the Roundtable on Health Literacy of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She is co-editor of Medical Management of Vulnerable and Underserved Patients: Principles, Practice, and Populations (second edition, 2016).
Dr. Fernandez received her bachelor’s degree at Yale University, her medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and completed her residency, chief residency and fellowship at UCSF.
As of April 2025, Dr. Fernandez reported no external relationships.
Heather L. Heiman, MD
Dr. Heiman is Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. She serves as Interim Associate Dean for Undergraduate Medical Education, where she is responsible for curriculum, assessment and evaluation across the college’s three campuses in Chicago, Peoria and Rockford, Illinois. She also maintains a busy outpatient internal medicine practice within the Academic Internal Medicine division. Prior to moving to the University of Illinois in 2019, she spent sixteen years at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, developing curriculum and assessment within clinical skills and serving as medical director of the standardized patient center.
Dr. Heiman previously served as Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Internal Medicine Longitudinal Knowledge Assessment (LKA®) Approval Committee. Prior to this role she served as a member of the prior Internal Medicine Board Exam Committee from 2013 to 2020. She received the Midwest Clinician Educator Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine in 2012. She is a fellow of the American College of Physicians.
Dr. Heiman received her undergraduate degree from Duke University, where she was an Angier B. Duke scholar, a full-tuition award based on academic merit. She obtained her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed her internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
As of April 2025, Dr. Heiman reported the following external relationships:
Dr. Heiman reported receiving a Stemmler Grant to study the correlation of medical school assessments with residency milestones, paid to the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
Suresh G. Nair, MD, Council Director
Dr. Nair is the Physician-in-Chief of the Lehigh Valley Cancer Institute (LVCI) in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and leads the health network’s academic programs. Dr. Nair is the Medical Director of the LVCI membership in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Alliance and has practiced oncology in the community setting for more than 30 years. He is the initial holder of the Auxiliary of Lehigh Valley Hospital Endowed Chair in Cancer.
With clinical expertise in melanoma, kidney cancer and immunotherapy, Dr. Nair’s focus is to provide the highest-quality cancer care, including standard and research treatments. He leads a variety of clinical trials at Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) to provide leading-edge options to patients. He leads the high-dose interleukin-2 program at LVHN for advanced melanoma and kidney cancer. Dr. Nair started the hematology/oncology fellowship at LVHN and served as the initial program director.
Dr. Nair has been a site principal investigator in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cooperative Group Program for over 25 years and was the first chair of the NCI Early Phase Central Institutional Review Board. He has been a site principal investigator of over 40 T-cell checkpoint inhibitor trials at LVCI.
Dr. Nair received his medical degree from Sidney Kimmel Medical College (then Jefferson Medical College) in Philadelphia. He completed his residency at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania, and his fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh.
As of May 2025, Dr. Nair reported the following external relationships:
Funding for clinical trial support, including research staff and expenses, paid to Lehigh Valley Health Network, from the following companies:
- Bristol-Myers Squibb, serving as local hospital principal investigator of multicenter immunotherapy clinical trial.
- Elicio Therapeutics, serving as local principal investigator of multicenter vaccine study in pancreatic cancer, subsite of Memorial Sloan Kettering.
- Strata Oncology, serving as local hospital principal investigator for genomic testing and clinical trials.
James A. Rowley, MD
Dr. Rowley is a Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (Rush) in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine. He is program director of the Sleep Medicine Fellowship at Rush. His practice at Rush is primarily sleep medicine; he also rounds on the inpatient pulmonary consult service and manages noninvasive ventilation for patients with neuromuscular disorders in the Rush multidisciplinary neuromuscular clinics. Dr. Rowley is a Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, where he also served as division chief for Pulmonary/Critical Care & Sleep Medicine.
Dr. Rowley has volunteered extensively for multiple professional associations. He has served on the board of directors of both the American Thoracic Society and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He served as President of the Academy from 2023 to 2024.
Dr. Rowley was a member of the ABIM Sleep Medicine Test-Writing Committee from 2009 to 2016 and the Sleep Medicine LKA Approval Committee from 2020 to 2023.
Dr. Rowley is a graduate of the New York University School of Medicine. He did his internal medicine residency at the University of Chicago Medical Center and his fellowship in pulmonary/critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
As of February 2025, Dr. Rowley reported the following external relationships:
Dr. Rowley serves in significant roles with the following organization, receiving reimbursement or compensation as listed:
- The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, member, Board of Directors, receiving honoraria and reimbursement for travel expenses.
Suzanne G. Watnick, MD, FASN
Dr. Watnick, an ABIM Board Certified nephrologist, is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington and practices nephrology at the Seattle VA Medical Center. She provides direct care for chronic kidney disease (CKD) and dialysis patients, teaching nephrology fellows in the outpatient CKD and dialysis environments, having served as the nephrology training program director at Oregon Health & Science University from 2008 to 2016. She served as the Chief Medical Officer at the Northwest Kidney Centers from 2017 to 2023, overseeing the response to the COVID-19 pandemic locally and nationally for the dialysis community. She led the organization’s ESRD [end-stage renal disease] Seamless Care Organization, the first internal medicine specialty-specific accountable care organization, providing novel approaches to value-based care through integrated community models. She received the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) mid-career leadership award in 2022.
Dr. Watnick is currently serving as the inaugural ASN Health Policy Scholar and is an active member of ASN’s Quality Committee and Policy & Advocacy Committee. She works closely with the Department of Health and Human Services to foster innovation through the KidneyX program and improve care for Medicare beneficiaries on dialysis. She received the National Kidney Foundation’s 2024 Massry Award for her work in policy and advocacy. She has authored over 75 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, with coverage in The New York Times, National Public Radio and the Associated Press.
Dr. Watnick earned her bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and her medical degree at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She completed her residency at the University of California, San Francisco, and completed fellowships in both nephrology and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars’ Program at Yale University.
As of April 2025, Dr. Watnick reported the following external relationships:
Dr. Watnick serves in significant roles with the following organization, receiving reimbursement or compensation as listed:
- The American Society of Nephrology, Health Policy Scholar, with compensation.