Date & Location

Date: 3/10/2022
Time: 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM
Location: Virtual Event






Stephanie Bryant Abbuhl, MD, RES’83, is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is board certified in both emergency medicine and internal medicine and completed the ELAM (Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine) fellowship.

Dr. Abbuhl played a key role in the evolution of emergency medicine into a full academic department at Penn and served in several leadership positions including Interim Chair, Medical Director, and Vice Chair. She actively practiced and taught emergency medicine for 38 years until her transition to emeritus status in 2021.

Dr. Abbuhl’s primary research interests include establishing evidence-based best practices for faculty development (both men and women) and investigating gender issues surrounding careers in medicine. For 20 years she served as Executive Director of FOCUS on Health & Leadership for Women, a unique faculty development and leadership program funded by the Dean to recruit, retain, and advance women faculty and promote women’s health research. As such, she was involved in many innovative gender equity and mentoring initiatives within the School of Medicine, across the University, and nationally. In recognition of decades of efforts by Dr. Abbuhl, the FOCUS team, and the leadership of the Perelman School, the FOCUS program received the 2014 AAMC Women in Medicine Leadership Development Award and, in 2021, was one of the winners of the coveted NIH Prize for Enhancing Faculty Gender Diversity in Biomedical and Behavioral Science.

Informed by her experiences leading FOCUS initiatives, Dr. Abbuhl led the unique, RO1-funded NIH-TAC (Transforming Academic Culture) trial, which assessed whether a multi-faceted intervention — utilizing a cluster-randomized design and implemented across the entire Perelman School of Medicine — would improve the academic productivity and job satisfaction of women faculty. This ambitious trial helped galvanize PSOM leadership and faculty and heralded a more robust era of gender equity initiatives targeting leadership training and professional development; longitudinal cohorts; family-friendly policies; promotion, recruitment, searches, and salary; community building; and beyond.

Along with a team of multidisciplinary Penn colleagues, Dr. Abbuhl developed the Penn Pathways career-leadership program for assistant professors in the STEM fields; she has led the program since its launch in 2013. In addition, she currently runs career leadership workshops and has a coaching practice for women and men in medicine.

Dr. Abbuhl has been recognized with the 2012 AAMC Group on Women in Medicine and Science Leadership Development Award; the 2013 Trustee’s Council of Penn Women-Provost Award at Penn for her leadership in advancing women at the University of Pennsylvania; the 2015 Arthur Asbury Outstanding Mentoring Award at the Perelman School of Medicine; and the 2021 FOCUS Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Abbuhl lives in Bryn Mawr with her husband of 36 years, and they have three grown sons. She has found retirement to be a wonderful balance of professional activities, as well as an opportunity to read, cook, hike, bike, serve on the board of an arboretum, and — most importantly — enjoy more time with family and friends.


Barbara J. Turner, MD, MSEd, M’78, INT’79, RES’81, GED’84 is a practicing general internist with over 35 years of experience in health disparities and community-partnered research. Since 2018, she has been Clinical Professor of Medicine at Keck School of Medicine, Senior Advisor of the Gehr Center for Health Systems Science and Innovation, and Senior Fellow at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, all at the University of Southern California. Dr. Turner completed medical school in 1978 and residency in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1981. She also completed fellowships in Community Medicine at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London and at Penn as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, receiving a MSEd degree in 1984.

Dr. Turner served as a professor at Thomas Jefferson University and, in 2000, returned to Penn as tenured professor of medicine. She assumed leadership of Penn’s T32 Primary Care Physician-Scientist Fellowship Program. In 2010, she established the Center for Research to Advance Community Health (ReACH) at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; ReACH now has 29 scholars from multiple disciplines and institutions who share the mission of improving health outcomes through community-oriented research focusing on low-income, Hispanic residents of South Texas.

Dr. Turner’s research has addressed HIV infection, substance use, and improving quality of primary care for at-risk populations by developing and implementing evidence-based interventions to prevent and manage chronic disease. She has over 190 peer reviewed publications, many of which are with her more than 60 mentees who are students and faculty from diverse health care disciplines; she has proudly watched many become leaders in medicine and other fields. More recently, she was principal investigator (PI) on multiple federal- and state-funded projects to implement hepatitis C virus screening and management in primary care practices serving low income Texas communities. She is the lead author on Underserved Populations: Advancing Health, Engaging, and Developing (UP AHEAD) Research Handbook: Practical Methods for Community Engagement, completed as part of a grant from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and published by the Society for Public Health Education.

Dr. Turner currently serves as the American College of Physicians’ (ACP) Deputy Editor for a collaboration with DynaMed, an online clinical resource used worldwide. She has held leadership positions in the ACP and the Society of General Internal Medicine and was Associate Editor and Executive Deputy Editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine. She was recognized as a Kimball Scholar by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 2012.

While she was a Penn medical student in 1976, she met her future husband, Francisco Gonzalez-Scarano, MD, who would later serve as Chair of Neurology. They have three terrific daughters and two adorable grandchildren.

Should you have questions about the event, please contact Courtney Coyle at haincb@upenn.edu.