Department of Medicine Faculty selected as 2020 Society of Medicine Award of Excellence winners

Khaalisha Ajala, MD, MBA, assistant professor in the Division of Hospital Medicine, and Kimberly Manning, MD, associate professor in the Division of General Medicine and Geriatrics, have been selected as winners of the 2020 Society of Medicine Award of Excellence. Ajala is recognized for Excellence in Humanitarian Services and Manning is recognized for Diversity Leadership.

Excellence in Humanitarian Services

Khaalisha Ajala, MD, MBA, is a hospitalist and associate site director for education at Grady Memorial Hospital. She cares for patients of diverse backgrounds directly and also has a deep-seeded passion for public health and patient education, always demonstrating how to bring this passion to trainee education.

Using her knowledge as an MBA, Ajala has designed, developed, and now maintains her own nonprofit agency, Heart Beats & Hip-Hop. Through this organization, she has hosted public health fairs to conduct health screenings in less-traditional local settings, where community members who may not have access to care can gain exposure to a health care provider.

More broadly, in the last year, she has made two journeys – one to Thailand and another to Ethiopia – to work with Emory trainees in educational and clinical efforts to help them engage the global community in health improvement. In Thailand, she taught students how to care for patients at risk for trafficking and sexual exploitation. While in Ethiopia, she served as an educator and clinical preceptor to Emory residents in the global health pathway, teaching them to care for high-risk patients at a local hospital.

With her active and unrelenting humanitarian efforts in mind, Ajala was also chosen as a member of the executive council for the Society of Hospital Medicine’s Care for Vulnerable Populations special interest group.

Diversity Leadership

Kimberly D. Manning, MD, FACP, FAAP, is a associate professor of medicine and the associate vice chair of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Emory University School of Medicine, where she also is a hospitalist at Grady Memorial Hospital. She demonstrates a strong passion for building and strengthening diverse clinical learning environments. This inspired her to promote cultural competency via lectures, curriculum development, and more.

Manning has designed a new educational modality – Bite-Sized Teaching (abbreviated “BST” and read as “BEAST”-Mode Teaching). This engages trainees as the teachers of their peers. As part of those sessions, Manning intentionally encourages and engages trainees from all backgrounds, including women, minorities, and trainees with varied ethnic and cultural perspectives.

Her leadership on the Emory Task Force on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion led her to be named the department of medicine’s first associate vice chair of diversity, equity and inclusion. Due in large part to her engagement, the medical school just admitted its largest class of underrepresented minorities, nearly doubling numbers from prior years.

Manning has received the 2018 AGCME Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award and the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of Black Women Physicians.

 

For a full list of award winners, visit The Hospitalist website.