Dr. Spencer Dunleavy

Starting in September 2026, I maintain an actively curated playlist of high-quality podcast episodes for a one-stop shop of useful audio learning in family medicine. Drawing from well known sources including Curbsiders, JAMA, professional organizations, and more, I want to help family medicine physicians practice at the top of their license. The playlist is sorted into subcategories and organized to help reinforce related topics. Please reach out if you additional thoughts on what can make this better!

You can find the Spotify playlist here.

Family Medicine Mentorship and Teaching (2023 - 2026)

As a family medicine resident at the University of Pennsylvania, I have become increasingly involved in undergraduate medical education. In addition to working with students in our clinic and inpatient services, I have partnered with faculty leaders in our family medicine clerkship to create a variety of lectures on core topics in primary care, including vaccines, hypertension, diabetes, and mood disorders (see video). I also volunteer as a resident mentor for medical students in the Measey Primary Care Pathway Program. Teaching evidence-based and social justice-informed medicine is one of my biggest passions, and the more we engage medical students in this, the better we can address health inequity across the United States.

Anti-racism in medicine (Spring 2023)

As a member of the Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons Anti-Racism Fellowship and alongside my friend and colleague Dr. Grace Pipes, I helped to co-design a 4-week elective course for senior medical students exploring the history of medical racism in the United States. We assembled and created a collection of multidisciplinary lectures, readings, discussions, and workshops to push soon-to-be physicians to think more critically about the causes and ways we can dismantle racism in our healthcare system. Shown here is an analysis I presented in one of our lectures, in which we examined the lack of progress in relative health disparities over time for various top causes of death in various minority communities. This course was first taken by fourth year medical students as an elective in the fall of 2023.

Data Science and the Health of New Yorkers (Fall 2022)

In 2022, in collaboration with faculty Dr. Benjamin Lebwohl and Prof. Mary Beth Terry, I served as head instructor of a new 220-student course called "Data Science and the Health of New Yorkers" at Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. This course focused on connecting core ideas of data science, public health, and epidemiology to supplement the clinical curriculum at Columbia's medical school and was delivered in an active-learning format with both traditional lecture and breakout group formats.

My share of the teaching focused on facilitating students to learn basic statistical methods (including fixed effects regression) and programming concepts in the statistical language R using publicly available datasets (such as NYC-HANES); outside of lecture, I also designed a 12-part series of videos to introduce students to programming in R (see video), designed practice problems and solutions to review course content, and helped create the final project and final exam.

Physical Sciences 2 and 3 (2015 - 2017)

In college, I served as head teaching fellow in the largest undergraduate physics course at Harvard University. As part of the two-semester long course covering basic mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, I conducted exam review sessions for students, designed weekly practice and review materials (see video), and managed a team of graduate teaching fellows. This course helped introduce me to core concepts in active learning pedagogy and served as an inspiration for my interest in educational research.