Leo H. Criep Symposium on Patient-Provider Communication: Keynote Speakers

Forrest Lang, MD is Professor, Vice-Chair, and Director of Medical Education Division at East Tennessee State University (ETSU), Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Lang is an internationally-known researcher and educator in the field of patient-centered communications. He has conducted numerous workshops on teaching patient-centered communication to medical educators and has been funded to develop teaching and assessment approaches to communication skills. He received the Gabriel Smilkstein Award, at the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine's 27th Forum for Behavioral Science in September 2006. Dr Lang also works on Rural Medicine education programs, developing academic programs that span from rural high school through post-residency fellowship programs. These programs include the Appalachian Preceptorship, and, the Rural Primary Care Track. This track boosts that a majority of its students enter careers in family medicine and primary care and settle in rural communities in the region. As a result of his contribution to rural Tennessee he received the 2003 Tennessee Academy of Family Physicians' "John S. Derryberry M.D. Distinguished Service Award."

Gregory Makoul, PhD is professor and director of the Center for Communication and Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he oversees communication education and research. Dr. Makoul is a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Ethics and Communication in Health Care Practice and a member of Northwestern's Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. His research focuses on communication, decision making, and health promotion in medical encounters, as well as communication skills teaching and assessment. Over the past several years, Dr. Makoul has helped put health communication on the national agenda though his work with the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Board of Medical Specialties, and the Department of Health and Human Services. He developed North America's most widely used model for teaching and assessing communication skills. In 2003, he received the American Academy on Communication and Healthcare - Lynn Payer Award for outstanding contributions to the literature on the theory, practice and teaching of effective health care communication and related skills. He moved to Chicago from the East Coast, earning his PhD (Communication Studies) at Northwestern in 1992.

James Tulsky, MD is Professor of Medicine at Duke University and the Durham VA Medical Center and Director of the Duke Center for Palliative Care. He has a longstanding interest in doctor-patient communication and the assessment of quality of life, particularly in the context of end-of-life care. Dr. Tulsky was a Project on Death in America Faculty Scholar, and is a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Faculty Scholars Award and a VA Health Services Research Career Development Award. In 2002, he was given the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest national award given by the White House Office of Science and Technology for early career investigators. Dr. Tulsky earned his B.A. at Cornell University, his M.D. at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago and completed internal medicine residency and a RWJ Clinical Scholars Fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.