One of our newer Editorial Review Group Chairs, Dr. Belinda Chen has served as Chair in Medical Education since July 2020. Since then, we have sent her 51 titles, and she has coordinated reviews of 21 of them so far, calling on a network of 18 reviewers from her institution, Johns Hopkins, as well as five other medical centers.   

Dr. Chen is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director, Faculty Programs in Curriculum Development, in the Johns Hopkins Bayview Division of General Internal Medicine. After getting her BA from Cornell, she earned her MD at Johns Hopkins and completed her residency at the Hospital for the University of Pennsylvania. She is Board Certified in Internal Medicine. 

Of her current role, she says, “I count it a privilege to be a part of a professional group where people still aspire to the ideals of being a personal physician who puts patients first and strives to study and teach skills that help others to do the same. The collaborative and generous team spirit is infectious!” 

Dr. Chen teaches Community-Oriented Primary Care and precepts in the resident continuity clinic. She is an editor and contributor for the two most recent editions of the classic textbook for health professions curriculum developers: Curriculum Development for Medical Education: A Six-Step Approach (Johns Hopkins University Press). The 2016 third edition was selected for Doody’s Core Titles 2021 and the fourth edition will be published later this year by Johns Hopkins University Press. In 2017, she won the Hopkins Institute for Excellence in Education (IEE) Award for Teaching Excellence for part-time faculty and was a co-winner of the IEE Educational Innovations Award. In 2020, she was awarded the Professor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. 

Dr. Chen took over the Medical Education Review Group from Dr. Patricia Thomas, who was a mentor and coeditor of the curriculum development book. She agreed to take on this volunteer position because, as she puts it, “I’m old-school enough that I enjoy receiving real books and encouraging others to both read them and review them. During COVID, I particularly enjoyed getting some new books without having to go out to find them!”