Dr. Rachel Kowalsky, Assistant Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics, was recently appointed to the leadership team for the Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) LEAP (Longitudinal Educational Experience Advancing Patient Partnerships) Program. LEAP is an innovative program that allows students to participate in the healthcare experiences of assigned patients who reside in their community, from the beginning of their medical school experience and continuing throughout their four years of medical school. Dr. Kowalsky joins the Department of Emergency Medicine's Dr. Susan Fraymovich on the leadership team.
Dr. Kowalsky is board certified in Pediatrics and Pediatric Emergency Medicine. She is the Site Director for the Medical Humanities Academic Practice Track of the NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia-Cornell Emergency Medicine Residency Program. She is also the Associate Director of the Weill Cornell Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine’s DiversifiED Summer Apprenticeship for underrepresented and underserved premedical undergraduate students.
After Dr. Kowalsky completed her BA at Brown University, she remained in New England where she attended Tufts University School of Medicine, receiving her medical degree (MD) and a Masters of Public Health (MPH). She came to NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital to complete her residency in Pediatrics, and continued her training with a Fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at New York University/Bellevue Hospital Center.
As part of her work with the residency program, Dr. Kowalsky teaches a narrative medicine workshop for WCM pediatric residents. Her short stories and essays have been published in the Journal Of The American Medicine Association (JAMA) and Orca Literary Magazine, featured on popular writing blogs jmww, HerStry, KevinMD, and the anthologies “Real Life of a Pediatrician” and “Perspectives.” She has been featured by the Airway Storytelling group, and was a guest artist at the New York Mills Cultural Center in New York Mills, MN. In 2021, Dr. Kowalsky won the New England Journal of Medicine’s First Annual Medical Fiction Contest for her short story, “The Billboard".
