The AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) announced today that Laura Roberts, MD, MA, has been named the next editor-in-chief of Academic Medicine, one of its peer-reviewed, scholarly journals. She will succeed David Sklar, MD, a distinguished professor emeritus of emergency medicine at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a senior advisor and professor at the Arizona State University College of Health Solutions, who has served as editor-in-chief since 2012.
Roberts will begin her five-year term on Jan. 1, 2020, becoming the second female editor-in-chief since the journal was founded in 1926. She has served as editor-in-chief for the journal Academic Psychiatry since 2002, has been a member of the editorial board for Academic Medicine since 2013, and serves as a peer reviewer for many other scientific and education journals.
“Dr. Roberts is an exceptional scholar, educator, and leader in academic medicine, and our community will undoubtedly reap the rewards of her experience and expertise as she leads the journal into the next generation of scholarly publishing,” said Darrell G. Kirch, MD, AAMC president and CEO.
Roberts is chairman of and the Katharine Dexter McCormick and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is an internationally recognized scholar in bioethics, psychiatry, medicine, and medical education. Roberts has received competitive funding continuously since 1997 from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and private foundations. Her work has led to advances in the understanding of ethical aspects of physical and mental illness research; societal implications for innovation in genetics and the neurosciences; health disparities in urban, rural, and frontier communities; the impact of medical student and physician health issues; and optimal approaches to fostering professionalism in medicine.
Widely recognized for her bioethics work and leadership in psychiatric education, Roberts received the 2015 MacLean Center Prize and the Distinguished Psychiatrist Award from the American Psychiatric Association in 2005 and 2010, and she was recognized as the foremost leader in psychiatric education in the United States and Canada by the University of Toronto in 2008. Roberts has also received numerous awards for leadership, teaching, and science.
“I am honored to become the next editor-in-chief of Academic Medicine,” says Roberts. “Because learning itself is at the heart of every physician’s work, advancing excellence in education is a natural focus for our journal. As the journal looks to its next hundred years, I am excited to work with my colleagues across all fields of medicine and the health professions in leading a vision for the journal’s future.”
Roberts completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Chicago and her medical degree and a fellowship in clinical medical ethics at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She received her residency training in psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.
The top-ranked journal in its field, Academic Medicine serves as an international forum for the exchange of ideas, information, and strategies to address the major challenges facing the academic medicine community as it strives to carry out its missions in the public interest. For more information, visit www.academicmedicine.org.
The Association of American Medical Colleges is a not-for-profit association dedicated to transforming health care through innovative medical education, cutting-edge patient care, and groundbreaking medical research. Its members are all 154 accredited U.S. and 17 accredited Canadian medical schools; nearly 400 major teaching hospitals and health systems, including 51 Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers; and more than 80 academic societies. Through these institutions and organizations, the AAMC serves the leaders of America’s medical schools and teaching hospitals and their more than 173,000 full-time faculty members, 89,000 medical students, 129,000 resident physicians, and more than 60,000 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the biomedical sciences.