Executive Director                [Penn Pulse Article]
Stephanie Abbuhl, MD
Vice Chair and Associate Professor
Department of Emergency Medicine
E-MAIL

Stephanie Abbuhl, MD is Vice Chair and Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She is board certified in both emergency medicine and internal medicine and completed the ELAM (Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine) fellowship in the spring of 2005.  Dr. Abbuhl played a key role in the evolution of Emergency Medicine into a full academic department at Penn, and provided leadership as the acting chair of the new department from 1993-1994.  She also served as Medical Director of the Emergency Department from 1990 to 2004.   She has continued to actively practice and teach emergency medicine for a total of 22 years of clinical and educational service. Dr. Abbuhl's honors include: AOA (1980); the Bryce Collier Prize for Compassion in Medicine (1980); the American Medical Women's Association Award (1980); Excellence in Teaching Award (1992); Philadelphia Magazine's "Top Doc" award (1994, 1996); The Lenore Rowe Williams Award (2003); and, the Emergency Medicine Residency Mentorship Award (2003). Dr. Abbuhl's research interests include operational and administrative issues in emergency medicine, pain management, and faculty development. She has over 80 publications to her credit and serves as a peer reviewer for two prominent emergency medicine journals. Dr. Abbuhl is the Executive Director of FOCUS on Health and Leadership for Women, a faculty development program funded by the dean of the School of Medicine since 1997, to recruit, retain and promote women faculty. In this role she has been involved in many key gender equity initiatives within the School of Medicine and across the University. She has been invited to speak at academic health centers across the country on the issues concerning women in medicine, women's professional development, and leadership mentoring.  In 2004, the FOCUS program received the AAMC's Women in Medicine Leadership Development Award.

Director of Professional Development
Lucy Wolf Tuton, PhD
Adjunct Associate Professor, Medicine
Adjunct Associate Professor of Prevention and Population Health
Director, Program Development in Community Health
Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Executive Director, Bridging the Gaps
E-MAIL

Lucy Wolf Tuton, PhD serves as Executive Director of Bridging the Gaps, a program which is jointly administered by seven academic health centers in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Bridging the Gaps provides health related service in underserved communities while training community responsive health and social service professionals. The Philadelphia Bridging the Gaps Program has developed a Bridging the Gaps Clinical Scholars program which is made up of the Bridging the Gaps Community Health Internship Program, Bridging the Gaps Seminar Series and Bridging the Gaps Clinical Program. At the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Dr. Tuton is Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine, Adjunct Associate Professor of Prevention and Population Health, and Director of Program Development in Community Health in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She is a core faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and in this capacity, she is co-leader of both the community and leadership curricular components. She is also Director of Professional Development for FOCUS on Health and Leadership for Women, a program which promotes both advocacy, education and research in women's health and the advancement of women in academic medicine.

Anne Rentoumis Cappola, MD, ScM is an assistant professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, director of research education for the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism, and senior scholar in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Cappola's research focuses on the hormonal alterations that occur with aging and the clinical impact of these changes, particularly in older women. Her program is funded by the National Institute on Aging, the American Federation for Aging Research, and the Hartford Foundation. Ongoing projects include analyses of the relationship between levels of the androgens DHEA-S and testosterone and muscle loss in older women; of the combined effects of endocrine, inflammatory, and nutritional factors as risk factors for the frailty syndrome; of the metabolic changes in men and women who sustain a hip fracture; and of the association between thyroid dysfunction and cardiovascular disease in older men and women. Dr. Cappola received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Harvard University, a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her previous awards include a Hoopes Prize (1990), the Lemmon Company Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Study of Medicine (1994), the Horatio C. Wood Prize in Pharmacology (1994), and the Dorothy Dillon Eweson Lecturer on the Advances in Aging Research (2005). Dr. Cappola is the Director of Research Programs for FOCUS on Health & Leadership for Women.

Director of Clinical Faculty Development
Jo Buyske, MD
Associate Professor of Clinical Surgery
Chief of Surgery
Director of Minimally Invasive Surgery
Penn Presbyterian Medical Center
E-MAIL

Jo Buyske, MD is Chief of Surgery and Director of Minimally Invasive Surgery at Penn Presbyterian, as well as an Associate Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  Dr. Buyske played a key role in the development of Penn faculty surgical services at Penn Presbyterian, starting with her recruitment there as Chief in 1999.  In her role as Director of Operating Rooms, she oversaw the growth of the OR services from 7 to 18 operating rooms, with an ever increasing complexity of cases.  She also established the minimally invasive surgical fellowship at Penn, which she ran for five years.  Her clinical practice is focused on gastrointestinal surgery with a special emphasis on advanced laparoscopy.  She has particular expertise in the surgical management of complicated foregut disease such as achalasia and gastroesophageal reflux disease.  Dr. Buyske is on the editorial board of Archives of Surgery, and is the vice president of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES), president-elect of the Massachusetts General Surgical Society, as well as being a director of the American Board of Surgery (ABS).  She frequently speaks at national meetings as well as other academic medical centers on the topic of women in surgery.  Dr. Buyske's honors include AOA (1986), Keynote speaker for the Elizabeth Kirk Rose Women in Medicine Dinner at Penn in both 2000 and 2006, Philadelphia Magazine's "Top Doc" recognition in 2002, 2005, and 2006, as well s recognition in Castle Connolly's America's Top Doctors in 2005 and 2006.  She has also been the subject of a documentary on the Lifetime Network series "Women Docs."  Dr. Buyske is a graduate of Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Massachusetts' General Hospital's surgical residency.

Director of Operations
Patricia Scott, BA
E-MAIL

Patricia Scott serves as Director of Operations for FOCUS on Health & Leadership for Women. In this role, Ms. Scott supports FOCUS' involvement in many key gender equity initiatives within the School of Medicine and across the University, as well as nationally. Along with FOCUS Executive Director Dr. Stephanie Abbuhl, Ms. Scott spearheaded the first intensive effort to compile, collect, and analyze gender statistics for every department, rank and track in the School of Medicine and compare these data with national statistics published by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The FOCUS Benchmarks Initiative is currently in the process of issuing its sixth annual report, Benchmark Data: Gender Statistics of Faculty-- University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. This document has continued to expand in scope and has become an integral tool utilized across the School of Medicine to help monitor progress in efforts to improve the retention, promotion and recruitment of women in academic medicine. Ms. Scott has been instrumental in securing extramural funding to support the growth of the women's health research related initiatives of FOCUS. She supervises the “Junior Faculty Investigator Awards” program, which to date has awarded 23 seed grants to junior faculty, as well as the “Medical Student Fellowships,” which have supported 22 Penn medical students in fulltime faculty-mentored research projects related to women's health. Ms. Scott is also responsible for managing the overall day-to-day administrative and organizational infrastructure for all professional development and research-based initiatives. In addition to the initiatives above, this includes two annual conferences for women in medicine and an actively attended bimonthly Seminar Series for men and women faculty.  Ms. Scott received her bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Administrative Coordinator
Susan Primavera
E-MAIL

Susan Primavera is the administrative coordinator for FOCUS and is responsible for providing administrative support to the broad range of professional development and research initiatives. She combines her FOCUS responsibilities with a similar role for the Bridging the Gaps Program which combines the training of health professionals with the provision of health related service to underserved communities. Ms. Primavera has also served as a staff assistant to numerous research studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Founder
Jeane Ann Grisso, MD, MSc