2020 Ballot

Eligibility to vote: You must be a voting member in good standing, and provide a valid AAP ID number at the time of casting your ballot. Any invalid or duplicate AAP IDs will be null and void. If you have any questions regarding the voting process, please contact us.

(You may view position’s duties, responsibilities and terms of office here.)

Ballots must be cast by Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Click here to vote

 

Board of Directors Member at Large – Two (2) open seats

There are two candidates for the Board of Directors Member at Large positions. Below, in alphabetical order, are their candidate statements.

Jonathan Emerson Kohler, MD, MA, FAAP, FACS

Thank you for considering my candidacy for a position on the Board of the WIAAP. I am a pediatric general surgeon at the American Family Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where I have spent the past five years developing connections between quaternary care specialists and primary care and emergency providers across Wisconsin. My work focuses on connected learning – using teleconferencing to engage participants from across the state in conversations about how to best care for kids. Those programs have taken a number of forms:

  • University of Wisconsin’s Project ECHO telementoring programs, including the nation’s only Project ECHO programs in pediatric emergency care and surgical care for children.
  • An opioid education series for providers prescribing opioids after surgery and trauma, and developed a website (saferopioids.org) that provides best practices for opioid prescribing, including teaching tools about how to prescribe safely for children.
  • Surgery Sett podcast, a leading surgery podcast that has recently focused extensively on COVID response.
  • My lab, which is called CHEDDR (Connected Health Education, Dissemination and Deimplementation Research) is focused on deimplementation of unnecessary interventions, including work on pediatric umbilical hernia repairs that lead to a recent Choosing Wisely guideline on the best age to refer patients for umbilical hernia repair.

As a member of the board of the WIAAP I hope to be a resource for building out our chapter’s communication tools for interacting both among ourselves and with other specialists and the public. Wisconsin’s pediatricians and pediatric specialists have so much to teach and to learn from one another, but particularly in the age of COVID we need to think of creative ways to make those interactions happen and to stay connected as a profession.

Suzanne Wright, MD, FAAP

After graduating from Baylor College of Medicine and completing residency at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, I moved to Central Wisconsin to begin my career as a general pediatrician. For the past 20 years, it has been a wonderful place to practice medicine and to raise a child.  Over the past 10 years, as a Pediatric Residency Program Director at Marshfield Clinic, I have been a strong supporter of the WIAAP’s Child Advocacy efforts, accompanying our residents as they participate in the chapter’s Advocacy Day each year.

Last summer, I was appointed to serve a one-year term on the WIAAP Board. It has been an honor to learn from and collaborate with passionate and experienced colleagues on the Board, and to chair the Communications Committee. I would appreciate the opportunity to continue to grow in this role. I believe in the power of collaboration and I look forward to networking with pediatricians throughout Wisconsin, to promote legislative and educational campaigns to protect the health and safety of our patients and their families.

Thank you for your consideration.