About

I have spent my working life in systems where the details matter: submarines, emergency departments, state public health, medical publishing. The through line is the same problem in different uniforms. What do you do with the signal everyone else has decided to ignore?

Annapolis and the Navy

Before any of it, I worked as an EMT in South Jersey. I went from there to the United States Naval Academy, where I studied aerospace engineering and graduated with honors in 2009, and then into the Navy’s nuclear submarine community. Engineering school and the submarine force teach the same lesson in different ways: complex systems fail quietly, at the interfaces, long before they fail loudly. I have never stopped thinking that way about the human body.

Emergency medicine

I earned my D.O. at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and completed my emergency medicine residency at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, where I served as chief resident. I am board certified by the American Board of Emergency Medicine and was the first emergency physician to become a diplomate of the American Interventional Headache Society. Along the way I directed clinical research programs at Inspira Health and Crozer-Keystone, served as an associate professor of emergency medicine at Jefferson University, and directed prehospital emergency medical services in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Since 2016 I have led NIDA-funded programs supporting emergency physicians in the management of substance use disorders. I still work clinically in community emergency departments in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey.

Public health

In February 2020, weeks before Delaware’s first case of COVID-19, I joined the Delaware Division of Public Health as Chief Physician. Over the following two years I helped lead the state’s medical response: testing operations touching millions, a contact tracing corps of more than two hundred, outbreak response in the state’s poultry plants that was covered by U.S. News & World Report, and one of the country’s early school Test-to-Stay programs, which we published in Public Health in 2022. Some of that work drew political heat. I would make the same calls again.

Editorial work

I wrote the monthly evidence column What to D.O. for Emergency Medicine News before becoming its Editor-in-Chief in 2023. EMN is the leading independent news publication in emergency medicine, published by Wolters Kluwer, and editing it is one of the privileges of my career. I also co-hosted the EMN Live podcast, contributed procedural chapters to the Merck Manual, serve on the editorial board of the Annals of Headache Medicine, and serve on the board of advisors for End Overdose, a national nonprofit dedicated to harm reduction.

BellyMD

Emergency medicine shows you a particular kind of patient over and over: someone with disabling gut symptoms, a normal CT, normal labs, and a discharge paper that says, in effect, nothing is wrong. Disorders of gut-brain interaction affect roughly forty percent of adults, and medicine has been slow to take them seriously. My wife Kady and I founded BellyMD to work on that problem, building symptom-tracking software and evidence-grounded therapeutics for the gut-brain axis. I disclose my financial interest in that work wherever I write about it. The details are on the disclosures page.

Credentials and honors

• B.S., Aerospace Engineering, United States Naval Academy, Class of 2009, with honors
• D.O., Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, 2014
• Emergency medicine residency, Cooper University Hospital, chief resident; M.P.H.
• Diplomate, American Board of Emergency Medicine
• First emergency physician diplomate, American Interventional Headache Society
• Editor-in-Chief, Emergency Medicine News, 2023 to present
• National Faculty, National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners
• Editorial board, Annals of Headache Medicine
• EMRA 45 Under 45: Influencers of Emergency Medicine, 2019
• PCOM Heroes of the Front Line
• Thirty-three peer-reviewed publications indexed on PubMed