Louis Nicholas Pangaro
Professor
Chair, Department of Medicine
Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences
MED USUHS
Bethesda, Maryland USA
Phone: 301 295 2010
Fax: 301 295 5792
Email: louispangaro@aol.com
Education and Professional Experience:
Dr. Pangaro is Professor and Chair, Department of Medicine at the Unformed Services University. He received an AB in English Literature and MD degree from Georgetown University. He did his residency in Internal Medicine at Georgetown as well as years in clinical endocrinology and as Chief Resident. In 1978 he joined the Army to do a research fellowship in the Kyle Metabolic Unit at Walter Reed, and he remained on active duty until 1998. In 1981 he was assigned to the USU, serving as director of Fourth Year programs, and later of the Third Year Clerkship (1985-1989), Introduction to Clinical Medicine (1989), and of all Educational Programs (1990). From 1995 to 2008 he was Vice-chair for Education. For his entire USU career, he has worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he sees patients in the Endocrine Clinic, and attends on the general medicine wards. He is board certified in Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism, and Geriatrics.
Scholarly Interest:
Dr. Pangaro’s scholarly work is in the evaluation of the competence of trainees, and he attempts to use clinical research as a model for making educational practice more rigorous. He converted half the 12-week medicine clerkship to an ambulatory experience through a series of randomized trials. He created “standardized examinees” to study the validity the prototype clinical skills examination of the NBME. He has championed descriptive evaluation of students by teachers, and created a new “synthetic” developmental framework for defining expectations of students and house officers (the “RIME scheme”, for reporter-interpreter-manger-educator) which has been studied for reliability and validity, and which is used in many clerkships in the United States. He oversees clinical teaching in all fours years at USU, as well as faculty development for house staff and teachers. Since 2000, he has designed and directed an intensive, six-day course for program directors in the theory and practice of assessing clinical competence. He has personally evaluated and given individual feedback to more than 2500 medical students. Nearly all of them are still part of the military medical community (about 25% of all active duty physicians).
Personal Background:
He has been active with the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM) since its inception and served as its President. He is President of the Alliance for Clinical Education, the coordinating council for all national organizations of American clerkship directors (ACE). Currently, he is on the editorial boards of Academic Medicine and Teaching and Learning in Medicine, and is past-chair of the Research in Medical Education Conference Committee of the GEA/AAMC.He has been honored by the AAMC with an Alpha Omega Alpha Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award (2005); by USU students with the Clements Awards for Excellence in Education (1990);by the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM) with all three of their recognitions: the inaugural award for Outstanding Program Development (1998, now renamed the “Louis N. Pangaro CDIM Outstanding Program Development Award”), the Outstanding Educational Research Award (2000), and the Outstanding Service Award (2005); by the Army chapter of the American College of Physicians with its inaugural Master Teacher Award (1997) and Laureate Award (2008), and by the Washington, DC chapter of the American College of Physicians with its inaugural Sol Katz Teaching Award (2005); and by the British Embassy Players for his production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Dr. Pangaro welcomes collaboration with those studying how the terminology of assessment influences the evaluation of students and residents.