PHRONESIS PROJECT
University of Virginia School of Medicine
Peggy Plews-Ogan
Dr. Plews-Ogan, MD is an internal medicine physician who attends in the residency clinic and the inpatient wards. She and her husband, Jim, began their work in health care as nurse practitioners working with migrant farmworkers. There they learned about public health and outreach based health care. They both went on to receive their MD from Harvard Medical School and Peggy did her residency in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston (Jim went to Children’s for Pediatrics). Peggy teaches about patient safety, humanism, positive emotion, and wisdom in medicine at the student, resident and faculty level. The focus of her research is on how people cope, change, and grow in the face of difficult circumstances (including how physicians cope with a medical error), and how people develop wisdom out of these trying circumstances. She is particularly interested in how we can foster wisdom in medicine. She and Jim have been married for 38 years and have two children, now grown and making their own mark on the world. Jim and Peggy are working together (as usual) in the Phronesis project, and Jim is the inspiration (and the brains!) behind the house calls part of the project.
Carolyn Engelhard
Carolyn Long Engelhard, MPA directs the Health Policy Program in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and holds the position of Associate Director of the Center for Health Policy, a joint venture between the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia. Professor Engelhard’s academic activities include analyzing and monitoring changes in health policy at the federal and state governmental levels and teaching in both the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine. She has been involved in medical student mentorship and teaching for many years, and enjoys working with all students to help them understand the changes in our health care landscape. Outside of UVA, Ms. Engelhard is involved with the local Free Clinic in Charlottesville and enjoys yoga, reading, cooking, and chasing after her two grandchildren when she can make it up to Baltimore.
Ira Helenius
Ira Helenius, MD MPH has been on the faculty of the Division of General Medicine at UVA since 2011. She moved to Virginia after completing her residency, a 2-year general medicine fellowship and 6 years of internal medicine practice at Mount Sinai in New York City. She came to Virginia looking for nature, a great job and a simplified life, and found them all. She is the medical director of University Medical Associates which is the internal medicine teaching clinic at UVA, and one of the largest outpatient practices at UVA. She enjoys having a job that allows her to use many different skills: clinical medicine, teaching, mentoring, project management in the clinic, and management of clinic faculty and staff. She is originally from cool and quiet Finland, enjoys triathlons, eating good food and gardening. Most of all she loves spending time with her 9 year old daughter.
Beth Jaeger-Landis
Beth is a Nurse Practitioner at the University Medical Associates, which is an Internal Medicine Clinic at UVA. This is where she has practiced for the past 13 years, and she enjoys our most challenging patients as well as Women’s Health patients. She has devoted her entire nursing career to the UVA Health System and has been here since her graduation from nursing school in 1989. Prior to going back to school for her graduate studies and NP certification she was a registered nurse in the Medical ICU for ten years. She is married and has two teenaged daughters and they live in Albemarle County. She loves to garden and kayak for leisure, and she runs to stay in shape.
Natalie May
Natalie May, PhD serves as the "glue" that holds the Phronesis Project together. This is a role she adopts often within the Division of General Medicine, probably not for her organizational skills but for her enthusiasm. Natalie has her doctorate in educational research from UVA, and she also holds a MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. As Associate Professor of Research she provides support to faculty research projects, writes grants, conducts qualitative research studies, and evaluates programs and curricula. She is an investigator with Dr. Plews-Ogan on the Wisdom in Medicine Project, and she is on the faculty of the Center for Appreciative Practice. She lives in Richmond with her husband; their daughter is a sophomore at the College of Wooster. In her spare time she volunteers with high school and college students who face homelessness and unstable housing. If she had more time she would clean her house, make quilts, and learn to play the clarinet.
Mo Nadkarni
Dr. Mohan Nadkarni has been affiliated with UVA for the past 22 years. He grew up in Bethesda, the son of a Hindu father and Jewish mother who shaped a lot of his interest in caring for others. He majored in biology and psychology at Harvard and then bartended and phlebotomized his way through Med School at the University of Pennsylvania. Following a medical consumer advocacy fellowship at Public Citizen in D.C., he was delighted to come to Charlottesville for Residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine. During his residency training, he was instrumental in founding the Charlottesville Free Clinic that robustly continues to serve patients. He then worked as a rural primary care doc for the underserved patients of Buckingham County at Central Virginia Community Health Center. Next he returned to UVA to revamp UMA and direct ambulatory education. An award-winning teacher, clinician, and advocate for the underserved, he became Section Chief of General Internal Medicine in 2015. He recently remarried, adding four new sons to the three already hatched. When he’s not doing all that, he’s climbing things, like mountains.
Jim Plews-Ogan
Jim Plews-Ogan (or Mr. Dr. Plews-Ogan, as we affectionately call him) has been a primary care clinician for over 30 years with expertise in breastfeeding support, adolescence, underserved and cross-cultural populations, palliative care, and home based care for children with medical complexity. He brings his community based experience to the academic world as the director for community and global engagement in the Department of Pediatrics. As the innovator and manager of By Your Side Pediatrics at UVa, he leads a program that provides comprehensive, coordinated care to medically complex children in their homes, and has assembled a team of inter-professional colleagues to mentor students and conduct research in complex care. He is the proud husband of Peggy Plews-Ogan and father of two adult children, Erin & William. He is also a terrific cook, piano & organ player, and enthusiastic runner and traveler.
John Schorling
John Schorling, MPH, MD has been at UVA for a long time, having come here as a resident in 1980. He did leave for a while, but couldn’t stay away and came back in 1988 to join the faculty in general medicine. While gone, he and his wife lived in Brazil for a year (where their son was born) working with Dick Guerrant, and they also took a year and traveled around the world. In 2001, John started the Physician Wellness Program, and got to travel around the world again with his wife (his high school sweetheart) and two kids studying physician wellness programs in other countries. John has many clinical interests, particularly palliative care. In addition to teaching, clinical care, and research, he also serves on the Center for Appreciative Practice faculty and teaches in the Healers Art program. He is also the director of the UVA Mindfulness Center. And when he's not at work, he is training for or running in marathons with his family.
Susanna Williams
Susanna Williams, PhD is on the faculty of the University of Virginia Mindfulness Center where she brings mindfulness into multiple disciplines, and does research on the impact of mindfulness in education and in healthcare. She also participates in the Center for Appreciative Practice. She has worked both domestically and internationally in the area of designing and implementing healthcare systems with a focus on full wellbeing. Her personal progression in health care led her from a curative model (hospital work), into a systemic approach (health care administration) and finally into a social medicine and primary care perspective (global health in developing countries). When the field of neuroscience revealed the amazing truths about the way humans develop, how we learn and what optimal wellness really is, she saw the relevance of her own personal meditation/mindfulness practice to her work in a powerful way. She believes that the foundation of wholistic wellbeing is generated by our connections to others and to ourselves and began to integrate mindfulness practices in her work more and more until ultimately she has shifted her career focus to teaching, learning and researching mindfulness. She is an outdoor enthusiast, biking and hiking in the mountains whenever possible.