speakers

  • Jailyn Avila completed medical school in Loma Linda, California, residency in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and an ultrasound fellowship in Lexington, Kentucky.  During residency,  Jailyn and her then ultrasound director Ben Smith started working on and subsequently launched the website 5minsono.com, a website dedicated to ultrasound education that morphed into Core Ultrasound, an ultrasound education repository that includes short (and long) videos, a clip bank and courses. Jailyn is currently Core Faculty for the UHS SoCal MEC Emergency Medicine Residency in Temecula, California where she also functions as the Associate Ultrasound Director, the Director of Faculty Development, and the Co-Fellowship Director for their Advanced Emergency Ultrasound Fellowship Program. Apart from her work on Core Ultrasound, she is a member of the Ultrasound GEL podcast (a podcast that discusses relevant ultrasound literature) and the director of the Ultrasound Leadership Academy and has and continues to collaborate with EMRAP.

    Instagram: @jailyn_avi @coreultrasound

  • Director of POCUS for Maine Health, Co-Director POCUS for MMC ED Residency

    Massachusetts GED, BA, MD, FACEP, Maine Class C Driver’s License, Red Cross White Swim Badge, Maine Fishing & Archery license, Ontario Pleasure Craft Operator, payer of taxes, donator to charity, LOVER AND TEACHER OF ULTRASOUND.

  • Skyler Lentz, MD is a board-certified emergency and critical care physician who speaks locally, regionally and nationally on critical care topics. He is the Division Chief of Resuscitation Science at the University of Vermont Department of Emergency Medicine and works clinically in the surgical and medical intensive care units and the emergency department. Skyler enjoys understanding and explaining the complex physiology of critical care and believes excellent critical care can be initiated in any emergency department. 

  • Dr. Neha Raukar is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Faculty Development in Emergency Medicine at Mayo Clinic. A leader in advancing academic emergency medicine, she focuses on innovation, leadership, and the evolving needs of faculty across generations. Her current work explores the integration of AI into medical education and the power of generational communication to strengthen teams and patient care. In sports medicine, she specializes in the prevention and management of life-threatening injuries in athletes, drawing on experience from high school fields to the Olympic stage. Her work—from Olympic sidelines to academic research—reflects her belief that excellence in patient care begins with empowered teams and bold ideas.

  • Dan has a bachelors degree from Northeastern and Masters and DNP in executive leadership from Simmons College.  He is has worked in Boston area hospitals and prior EMT and currently is the Director of Emergency and Patient Care Services at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital- Milton.  Outside his daily work he is a member of the National Disaster Medical System’s Trauma and Critical Care Team and an active member of the Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) and developing ski patrol member.

     

    Dr. Nadworny has a specific interest in emergency preparedness and public policy and advocacy.  As a nurse leader in emergency nursing is his goal to encourage the conversations in every department about advocacy and emergency preparedness. 

     

  • Cam Upchurch, MD is a board-certified emergency medicine and critical care physician. Cam works clinically in the emergency department, medical ICU, cardiovascular ICU, and surgical/trauma ICU at University of Vermont and the emergency department at Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital. He is the Director of Critical Care Education for the Department of Emergency Medicine, and Co-Medical Director of the University of Vermont Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) program. Cam has particular niches and lectures frequently on physiology-driven care, mechanical circulatory support and extracorporeal life support, pulmonary embolism, and refractory respiratory failure. 

     

  • Alia Aunchman MD, FACS is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, where she also attended medical school. She completed her general surgery residency at the University of Vermont Medical Center and fellowship in Surgical Critical Care at the Medical University of South Carolina. She is Interim Division Chief of Acute Care Surgery at UVMMC,  Associate Vice Chair of Clinical Operations in the Department of Surgery, and Vice Chair of Quality in the Department of Surgery. She is also in negotiations to be the next Queen of England. She is actively involved in her college as a member of the working groups for the Surgical Critical Care EPA’s and the Mastery of General Surgery Fellowship.  In addition to collecting accolades, she has also collected four children, most of whom have the same father (#4 she adopted from Haiti with her husband). She will tell you that her greatest achievement is her family, but it’s really the fact that she has seen Taylor Swift in concert four times.

  • Gita Pensa, M.D., FAAEM, is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brown University, and is widely recognized as one of the nation's leading experts on malpractice litigation stress and physician litigation support. Her open access podcast curriculum, "Doctors and Litigation: The L Word" is an introduction to the practical and psychological preparation necessary for malpractice litigation defendants, and is now used as a teaching tool in medicine, law, and the malpractice insurance industry. She works as a consultant to medical malpractice insurance companies, hospital systems and defense attorneys, and also has a busy practice as a well-being and performance coach for medical defendants in litigation. Dr. Pensa was the editor of the Academic Emergency Medicine journal’s monthly research podcast through 2024 and remains a managing editor at Emergency Medicine Reviews and Perspectives (EM:RAP).  She was named the EMRA (Emergency Medicine Residents' Association) National Faculty Mentor of the Year in 2018, and in 2019 she was awarded a Special Service Recognition Award from Rhode Island ACEP for “courageous public advocacy of Rhode Island Emergency Medicine Colleagues.” In 2020 she won the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award at the School of Medicine of Brown University.  Dr. Pensa has been featured in forums such as Time magazine, The SXSW Festival, NPR, and the new PBS documentary "A World of Hurt: How Medical Malpractice Fails Everyone.” You can find more about her at https://doctorsandlitigation.com/ .

     

  • David Mackenzie, MDCM is medical director at Maine Medical Center in Portland, and an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. He co-directs the MMC and MaineHealth ultrasound programs.

  • Graduate of the University of Vermont College of Medicine. 

    Pediatric Residency in San Diego.  Pediatric Emergency Fellowship at Brown University, Providence, RI.  Dr Nelson practiced Pediatric Emergency medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Nevada in Las Vegas for 20 years.  He is now a faculty member at the University of Vermont and the chief of our new section of Peds EM.   He lectures regionally, nationally and internationally.  His community and research interests include EMS education and Emergency Preparedness and Response. 

  • Matt Roginski is an emergency and critical care physician who practices in Dartmouth Hitchcock’s ED, MICU, and SICU. He serves as Dartmouth's critical care transport team's associate medical director. He is passionate about bringing critical care interventions outside of the ICU.

  • Dr. Motov is an Emergency Medicine Attending Physician and Research Director practicing in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Medical Academy of Latvia and completed his EM residency at Maimonides Medical Center. Dr. Motov is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine who is very passionate about safe and effective pain management in the ED.  His primary interests include non-opioid analgesics modalities and qualitative approach to opioid prescribing. Dr. Motov has been growing and researching this body of work both nationally and globally and has given multiple presentation of the subject of ED Pain Management. Dr. Motov has over 60 peer-reviewed pain-related publications in most prestigious Emergency Medicine Journals.

    Twitter: @painfreeED

  • Daniel Wolfson is an Associate Professor and Division Chief of Prehospital Medicine for the Larner College of Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine and the State of Vermont EMS Medical Director. He is the physician leader for Start Treatment and Recovery (STAR), an emergency department-based program to initiate patients with Opioid Use Disorder onto treatment with buprenorphine or methadone.