Margaret Greenwood-Ericksen, MD, MS
Research Forum 2025 Chair
Margaret Greenwood-Ericksen, MD, MSc is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of New Mexico with a secondary appointment in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department. She is an emergency physician and health services researcher whose career is focused on transforming the structure of rural healthcare delivery to improve outcomes for vulnerable communities. Her research explores rural emergency care delivery models and associated outcomes to identify disparities and inform policy-level interventions. She has a particular interest in Medicaid policy and behavioral healthcare delivery to rural communities.
She completed her Master’s at the National Clinician Scholars Program at the University of Michigan following her residency training at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency (HAEMR) Program. She is the past-president of the New Mexico ACEP Chapter, and served as ACEP’s representative to the National Quality Foundation’s committee for Rural Health Quality Measures. Within her Department, she serves as the Junior Faculty Representative to Senior Leadership and spearheaded the Clinical Scholars Research Program, a departmental research award which supports junior faculty seeking to become physician-researchers.
She is deeply invested in efforts to improve New Mexican’s health through innovations within Medicaid policy, mental health access, and opioid treatment. She is currently funded through New Mexico’s State Opioid Response (SOR) grant, awarded by SAMHSA, through which she is the Director for Outreach and Dissemination for the NM Bridge – a statewide program supporting hospitals and ED’s in initiation of Medications for Opioid Use Disorder programs. Within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, she has an affiliation with the Center for Behavioral Health Services Research and Evaluation (CBHTR), leading teams to conduct assessments of the state’s Medicaid mental health and substance use policies. She has developed rural-specific curriculum for quality improvement and was a founding member of Project ECHO’s First Responder Resiliency ECHO which addresses the mental health needs of emergency medicine workers in rural communities. She has ongoing collaborations with the University of North Carolina’s Rural Health Research Program to inform implementation of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ new rural healthcare payment and delivery model, the Rural Emergency Hospital. She is published broadly across rural health care delivery, rural health disparities, and rural emergency care outcomes and has received grant funding from the Emergency Medicine Foundation as well as UNM’s Clinical Translational Science Center.
Peter B. Pruitt, MD
Research Forum 2026 Chair
Dr. Pruitt is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He received his medical degree from the University of Maryland, a Master of Science from Northwestern University, and completed residency training at the Brigham and Women's/Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency (HAEMR). This was followed by an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)-sponsored T32 fellowship in health services and outcomes research at Northwestern University.
Dr. Pruitt’s research focuses on improving processes of care for emergency department patients, especially those with neurologic emergencies. He has a related area of interest in patient risk stratification, especially the creation and validation of clinical decision tools. In 2018 Dr. Pruitt received the SAEM Foundation Research Training Grant for his work to create a clinical decision tool for patients with subdural hematoma and preserved consciousness. He currently studies the interhospital transfer process with support from AHRQ.
James H. Paxton, MD, MBA, FACEP, FAHA
Research Forum 2027 Chair
Dr. Paxton is an Associate Professor and Director of Clinical Research for Detroit Receiving Hospital / Wayne State University Department of Emergency Medicine, and has served as core academic faculty for the EM residencies at both Sinai-Grace Hospital and Detroit Receiving Hospital since 2011. He received both his MD and MBA degrees from the University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH), and completed EM residency training at Henry Ford Hospital (Detroit, MI). He is an active clinical researcher and has served as PI for numerous industry- and publically-funded trials. He is the editor of several books on emergency medicine topics, and is a recognized expert and invited speaker for many regional, national and international lectures on emergent vascular access, stroke, cardiac arrest, and other resuscitation topics.
Patrick Maher, MD, MS, FACEP
Research Forum 2028 Chair
Patrick Maher, MD MS is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York, NY. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, and his Medical Degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC. He then went on to complete his Emergency Medicine specialty training at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where he also completed a Critical Care Medicine fellowship. After his clinical fellowship, Dr. Maher joined the faculty at Mount Sinai through the EM Research T32 program funded by the NIH / NHLBI. As part of this program, he obtained a Master of Science in Biostatistics from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. At Mount Sinai, he co-chaired the hospital CPR Committee and served as head of the Mount Sinai Hospital EM-CCM Division, leading a group of attendings with similar fellowship training in Critical Care Medicine. He currently works in both Emergency and Intensive Care in San Jose, CA.
Amber Sabbatini, MD, MPH, FACEP
Research Forum 2024 Chair
Dr. Sabbatini is a practicing emergency physician and federally-funded health services researcher who studies how the delivery of hospital care affects patient outcomes, resource utilization, and quality. To date, much of her work has revolved evaluating the impact of value-based payment policies and delivery system reforms on health outcomes and costs, especially for public payer populations. After residency, Dr. Sabbatini completed a research fellowship at the University of Michigan and then joined the faculty at University of Washington, where she was awarded an internal career development award (K12) in Patient-Centered Outcomes Research from the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research. Dr. Sabbatini is currently appointed as an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Systems & Population Health at the University of Washington. She serves as Core Faculty in the Section of Population Health in the Department of Emergency Medicine and within the Center for Health Policy and Innovation Studies in the School of Public Health. She has been PI of several federal and foundation awards, including an R34 from National Institute of Mental Health to examine the effects of Medicaid policies relating to health information exchange on mental health outcomes and an R01 from the National Institute of Aging where she is examining the unintended consequences associated with Medicare policies on outcomes for older adults with observation stays. Her work has been published in several high impact journals such as JAMA, NEJM, and Health Affairs and was utilized in the development of a novel emergency medicine episode-based cost measure to be implemented by CMS. In 2021, she was awarded the SAEM Young Investigator Award. Outside of research, Dr. Sabbatini has been involved in the regional implementation of Washington state’s Medicaid Transformation Project in King County, and has served on multiple workgroups related to improving care coordination and ED utilization among high needs Medicaid patients. She has a long history of service in organized medicine extending back to medical school. In residency, Dr. Sabbatini served on the Section Council of Emergency Medicine to the AMA House of Delegates and as a resident delegate to EMRA. She currently serves on the ACEP Research Committee and is Chair-elect of the ACEP Research Forum, as a member of the Emergency Medicine Data Institute Governance Team (representing the Research Committee), and has been an active member of QPSC for the past 3 years, working on the Measures Lifecycle subcommittee.
