Student Spotlight: Dr. Stephen DeMeo, DO, MMEL

Dr. Stephen DeMeo (fourth from right) and his Fellowship Group at Duke University

 

*NOTE: This Master’s in Medical Education Leadership degree is no longer offered online at the University of New England. For a full list of our online graduate offerings, please visit https://online.une.edu/degrees-and-certificates/.

Some background

I grew up in Kingston, NH (not far from UNE), but moved to Pennsylvania for both undergraduate years, and medical school at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine.

From there I stayed in the Philadelphia area and completed a residency in Pediatrics at the AI duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, DE, where I served as Chief Resident. I just completed a three-year fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, and it was during this fellowship that I enrolled in the Master’s in Medical Education Leadership (MMEL) program at UNE.

My fellowship track was in Medical Education, and the opportunity to pursue a Master’s was one that I jumped at.

UNE, and the MMEL online program was perfect for me as a busy fellow; the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) can be an extremely busy place, and the flexibility that the online program provided allowed me to work around long overnight shifts in the hospital, busy weeks on service in the NICU, etc… Something that would have been impossible in a traditional master’s setting.

In addition to the theoretical foundation that the MMEL coursework provided, the entire program always tries to reach back and ties the coursework to something practical in one’s own practice setting.

In my case, I used our Curriculum and Program Development course to design a new night float curriculum for pediatric residents in our NICU.

MMEL took me all the way from design/conceptualization to implementation and assessment, and in fact, the curriculum is now a permanent part of our rotation.

What I really enjoyed about the online program was that even though we were geographically separated, I felt like we were really able to build a community within our cohort, and I feel like I have made connections with physicians and other professionals that will endure moving forward.

This June, I was recognized with two awards

The first was the 2015 Michael Frank Fellow Teaching Award, awarded each year by the pediatric residents to the fellow who had the most influence on their training.

I know that the teaching skills I learned in MMEL helped my clinical teaching skills and certainly played a part in being recognized.

The second award I received was the 2015 Victor J. Dzau M.D. GME Innovation Award. As a bit of background, my major research project in fellowship was funded through an internal grant program at Duke called the GME Innovation Fund.

My project, “Predicting Neonatal Intubation Competency in Trainees” was recognized in 2015 as an outstanding project. This work was recently published in the medical journal, Pediatrics, here: http://ow.ly/Rvk9P

These days

I am now an attending Neonatologist at WakeMed Health & Hospitals in Raleigh, NC, where I also serve as the Pediatric Clerkship Site Director for the Campbell University School of Osteopathic Medicine. I am also an Adjunct Professor in Pediatrics at Duke University.

Thank you Dr. DeMeo, for being an inspiration and sharing your story! -MG