The Internal Medicine Residency Program, a joint effort of the GRU/UGA Medical Partnership and St. Mary’s Health Care System, is pleased to announce its first class of residents, who will begin their residency education on July 1, 2015.

The program received nearly 1,300 applications. A committee made up of Internal Medicine Residency Program faculty, along with members of the leadership from St. Mary’s and the Medical Partnership, interviewed approximately 100 candidates.

At noon on Friday, March 20, resident applicants participated in Match Day and were notified by the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP) where they will pursue their medical residencies. For the first time, 10 applicants learned that they had matched with the Internal Medicine program sponsored by the GRU/UGA Medical Partnership with St. Mary’s serving as the Major Participating Site. 

Matching applicants to specific graduate medical education programs is the culmination of a process during which applicants participate in interviews and visits to residency programs across the country. To determine the post-graduate medical education assignments, applicants rank programs at which they would like to complete residencies, and residency programs rank the applicants. The final pairings, coordinated by NRMP, are announced at noon on the third Friday in March. 

Residents are physicians who have graduated from medical school and are beginning supervised training which leads to licensure to practice medicine. During their three-year Internal Medicine residency, resident physicians practice alongside attending physicians to gain increasingly sophisticated knowledge, skills, and experience working with patients. In an Internal Medicine residency, these physicians will focus on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease in adults. 

The Internal Medicine Residency Program Appointments for 2015 are: 

• Brian Brewer
• Heather Brody
• Narayana Gowda
• Andrew Ke
• Soma Mandal
• Tenzing Phanthok
• Akhil Rasim Reddy
• Sonia Suda
• Kyle Walker
• Addison Zhang 

This first class of residents has a strong connection with Georgia.  It includes five individuals who attended the University of Georgia for their undergraduate degrees, one of whom will also be a Medical Partnership Class of 2015 graduate. In addition, another individual attended Emory University and received a Master’s degree from Georgia Institute of Technology. Overall eight of the ten have educational ties to the Southeast. 

 “We are very pleased that in the first year of our joint residency program, all 10 available positions have been filled,” said Don McKenna, St. Mary’s President and CEO. “To me, this speaks volumes about the attractiveness of our new program to the next generation of physicians. We are proud to be an integral part of this effort to bring more medical doctors to Georgia and to the Athens region in particular.”

“Commitment, hard work, and a passion to improve healthcare are all necessary for the development of a new residency program,” said GRU/UGA Medical Partnership Campus Dean Barbara Schuster, M.D. “Like the first class of Partnership medical students, these applicants have chosen to seize the opportunity to help build graduate medical education in Athens. Kudos and thanks to everyone who, through teamwork, brought the vision of GME in Athens to fruition.” 

These residents will arrive in Athens on June 24, 2015, for orientation and will begin work in the hospital on July 1, 2015. The internal medicine residency program can accommodate 10 residents in the inaugural year, with another 10 in 2016 and 10 more in 2017 for a maximum of 30 residents total. 

“Being the site of the first medical residency program in Northeast Georgia is a tremendous honor for St. Mary’s,” said Bruce Middendorf, M.D., St. Mary’s Chief Medical Officer. “Residents bring new energy and enthusiasm into our clinical areas. At the same time, working with these new physicians is exciting for our medical staff. We are looking forward to welcoming our first-ever residents and to working with them to further raise the bar for clinical excellence at St. Mary’s and across Northeast Georgia. This is a great day for our community.”

“We are excited to reach our next milestone in this collaborative effort to provide a high quality Internal Medicine residency program,” said Michelle A. Nuss, M.D., Campus Associate Dean for GME at the GRU/UGA Medical Partnership. “It is a compliment to the community of Athens and the area physicians that so many applications were filed, and our team worked hard to identify individuals who would be the best fit for this program. These 10 individuals will help address the need for more physicians in the State of Georgia.” 

“It is remarkable that a first-year program filled all its positions,” said Pete Yunyongying, M.D., Director of Graduate Medical Education for the Internal Medicine Residency Program. “With no history and no track record, it means that these applicants were impressed by the faculty, the physicians, the staff, the hospital, and the opportunity in Northeast Georgia.” 

The GRU/UGA Medical Partnership is a collaborative effort between Georgia Regents University and the University of Georgia and is addressing the critical shortage of physicians in the state. The Medical Partnership combines the significant instructional and research resources of UGA, the state’s flagship land-grant research university, with the expertise of the Medical College of Georgia at GRU.