Louis Pangaro, MD, MACP is Professor of Medicine and has been at USU since 1981. He served as Chair of Medicine from 2008 to 2018. His medical degree is from Georgetown University, where he completed both a residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in endocrinology. He joined the Army as a research fellow in endocrinology at Walter Reed in 1978, when he first taught USU students. He remained on active duty for 20 years and was assigned to the Uniformed Services University in 1981 serving in various roles including Director of Fourth Year Programs, Clerkship Director and Vice-chair for Education in the Department of Medicine. He was appointed Professor with tenure in 1998, and was selected as Department Chair in June of 2008. Dr. Pangaro helped lead the curricular redesign for SOM creating the “molecules to military medicine” curriculum. He also helped develop the Health Professions Education graduate program in his department. Dr. Pangaro's scholarly work addresses consistency and fairness in the evaluation of the competence of medical trainees. He created "standardized examinees" to calibrate the validity of the prototype clinical skills examination of the US Medical Licensing Exam. He developed the reporter-interpreter-manager-educator framework (the “RIME scheme”) used in many American medical schools, and introduced the concept of "synthetic" frameworks as an alternative to “KSA” for defining expectations of students and residents.
Dr. Pangaro has personally evaluated and given individual feedback to several thousand medical students. As a facilitator in the Stanford Faculty Development Program he has worked personally with more than one thousand faculty on their teaching skills. In 2000 he created a six-day course for GME program directors in assessing competence, and several hundred program directors have participated. He co-directs the annual Harvard Macy International Program for a Systems Approach to Assessment in the Health Sciences Education. His department has just initiated an MHPE and PhD program in medical education.
Dr. Pangaro has served as an at-large member of the National Board of Medical Examiners, and 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 served as President of the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM), and of the Alliance for Clinical Education (ACE), the coordinating council for eight national organizations of American clerkship directors. Dr. Pangaro has been honored by the AAMC with the Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award (2005), by USU students with the Clements Awards for Excellence in Education (1990) and by the USU Faculty with the inaugural Carol Johns Teaching Medal (2001). He has been recognized by the NBME with its Edith J. Levittt Distinguished Service Award; by CDIM with all three of their awards: the inaugural award for Outstanding Program Development (1998, now named the Louis Pangaro Award), the Outstanding Educational Research Award (2000), and the Outstanding Service Award (2005); and by the British Embassy Players for his production of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1990). He was recognized by the Army chapter of the American College of Physicians with its inaugural Master Teacher Award (1997) and by the Washington, DC chapter of the College with its Sol Katz Teaching Award (2005) and its Laureate Award (2012). In 2010, Dr. Pangaro was named as a Master of the American College of Physicians (MACP), and in 2012, he received the Distinguished Medical Educator Award from the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine. In 2018 he received the John P. Hubbard Award from the NBME for excellence in the field of evaluation in medicine.
Contact
Louis N. Pangaro, MD, MACP
Professor of Medicine and Interim Dean
F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine - "America's Medical School"
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
4301 Jones Bridge Road
Bethesda, Md. 20814
301-295-3016
dean-som@usuhs.edu
