Internal Medicine Residency Program – Departmental Leadership

Dr. Karen M. Freund is the Physician-in-Chief at Tufts Medical Center, and the Sheldon M Wolff Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine.

Dr. Freund earned her medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed residency training at Cambridge Health Alliance/ Harvard Medical School (internal medicine) and Boston University Medical Center (preventive medicine), followed by a general internal medicine fellowship at Boston University Medical Center.  She holds an AB from Harvard College, and an MPH from Boston University.

Dr. Freund’s research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for over 30 years, resulting in more than 180 publications. Her research focus is disease prevention and chronic disease management for women and under-resourced populations. She is currently principal investigator of a five-year NIH grant to eliminate breast cancer treatment disparities across the city of Boston through a regional collaboration of medical centers focused on patient navigation and social determinants of health. Her previous funding has included the development of patient navigation programs, and investigation of the impact of insurance reform on chronic disease outcomes.

Dr. Freund also studies the career trajectories of women and faculty underrepresented in medicine and science. She is a passionate mentor of early-career faculty as principal investigator of NIH-sponsored career development awards including Tufts’ Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health Program (along with Iris Jaffe MD PhD) and the KL2 Clinical Translational Career Development Program. Dr. Freund is a recipient of Tufts Medical Center’s BJ Magnani Leadership Award, the American Cancer Society - Harry and Elsa Jiler Clinical Research Professorship and was the Society of General Internal Medicine’s 2013 Distinguished Professor in Women’s Health.

Dr. Sucharita Kher is the Vice Chair for Clinical Operations and Quality in the Department of Medicine. In this Vice Chair role, she collaborates with the departmental leadership to build on the Department’s outstanding inpatient and ambulatory care and to ensure an environment that promotes delivery of safe, high quality and patient-centered care.

Dr. Kher is a physician in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine and runs the Asian Lung Clinic focused on pulmonary care for our Asian patient population. Her areas of expertise include asthma, COPD and tobacco dependence. She is an avid advocate for tobacco control.

Dr. Kathleen Finn is the Vice Chair for Education and Residency Program Director in the Department of Medicine. In this role she collaborates with department leadership to promote education and training for faculty, fellows and residents and to create a learning environment of curiosity, excitement and psychological safety.

Dr. Finn is a hospitalist by training. She earned her M.Phil in Social Anthropology from Oxford University and her medical degree at Harvard Medical School. She completed residency training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and worked as a hospitalist at both BWH and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She served as the Senior Associate Program Director for Resident and Faculty Development at MGH before joining Tufts in 2022.

Dr. Finn is known for creating innovative educational workshops and medical education research. Her research has focused on supervision, leave policies, discharge safety and teamwork. She was awarded the National Board of Medical Education Stemmler Educational Research Grant in 2015 to study supervision. She is currently Chair of the APDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee and was Course Director for the Society of Hospital Medicine national meeting in 2018. She was named top hospitalist in 2014 by the American College of Physicians and received the Society of Hospital Medicine Excellent in Teaching Award in 2020.

Dr. Michael Paasche-Orlow is the Vice Chair for Research and is a Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical Center and Tufts University School of Medicine.

Dr. Paasche-Orlow earned his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, completed residency training at the NYU-Bellevue Internal Medicine in the Primary Care Track, followed by a general internal medicine fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He holds a BA from Columbia College, an MA in medical ethics from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and an MPH in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

As a primary care clinician and a nationally recognized expert in the field of health literacy, Dr. Paasche-Orlow has dedicated his career to improving the care of vulnerable populations. Dr. Paasche-Orlow has over 250 peer-reviewed publications, his research has been continuously funded for over 20 years, and his work has yielded more than 50 million dollars in federal funding. Currently, Dr. Paasche-Orlow has eight clinical studies that examine health literacy and doctor-patient communication, various modes of patient education, and empowerment. He has been the lead designer of nine patient-oriented interactive behavioral informatics programs and has helped create and evaluate a range of patient empowerment and decision support tools that have been highly cited and broadly influential. His work has brought attention to the role that health literacy plays in racial and ethnic disparities, improving informed consent, and improving advanced care planning, as well as to the fact that appropriately designed information technologies can be empowering for patients with low health literacy. Dr. Paasche-Orlow is the founding Editor-in-Chief for Health Literacy Research and Practice. He has also helped promote the field of health literacy research as the Director of the Health Literacy Annual Research Conference for the past 14 years and serves as a member of the Health Literacy Roundtable for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

Dr. John B. Wong is Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs, Chief of the Division of Clinical Decision Making, Director of Comparative Effectiveness Research for the Tufts Clinical Translational Institute, and a Professor of Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine.

A Master of the American College of Physicians, a Past President of the Society for Medical Decision Making, and an Associate Statistical Editor for the Annals of Internal Medicine, he has been a member of guideline committees for the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, Infectious Diseases Society of America, European League Against Rheumatism, and the US Preventive Services Task Force and a consultant to the World Health Organization, National Academy of Medicine, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American College of Cardiology, and American Heart Association. He currently also serves as a member on the Committee on Publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society (which owns and publishes the New England Journal of Medicine).

His research focuses on the application of decision analysis to medical decision making to help patients, clinicians, and policymakers choose among alternative tests, treatments or policies, thereby promoting rational evidence-based efficient and effective patient-centered care that reflects individualized risk assessment and patient preferences. His mentorship has helped medical residents pursue research presented at national meetings, published in medical journals and obtain research funding and subspecialty fellowships.