Sonia Ananthakrishnan, MD, Receives Stanley L. Robbins Award for Excellence in Teaching

Sonia Ananthakrishnan, MD, assistant professor of medicine, has been recognized with the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine’s highest teaching honor, the Stanley L. Robbins Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The annual award honors an outstanding educator and acknowledges the importance of teaching skills and commitment to students and education. It was established in recognition of the exceptional teaching and devotion to students exemplified by Stanley L. Robbins, MD, former professor and chair of pathology.

“Dr. Ananthakrishnan achievements as a teacher, mentor, program developer, innovator, scholar and leader in medical education made her an outstanding candidate for this award,” a colleague said in recommending Ananthakrishnan for the award. “She identified the need to improve the quantity and quality of feedback and created a local and national reputation around the educational initiative of improving feedback exchanges across all levels of training in the department of medicine.”

Ananthakrishnan also found ways to improve the evaluation of medical student clinical reasoning skills. “As a clerkship director, she addressed the need for more high-quality assessment by creating the Observed Clinical Reasoning Assessments (OCRA). The OCRA has successfully integrated into the internal medicine clerkship and this style of examination has been adopted by several other clerkships (neurology and pediatrics) and even in the preclinical curriculum,” he added.

Ananthakrishnan has championed diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging on the medical campus. She is one of the original creators of the Lights On, Intent vs Impact, Full Stop, Teach (LIFT) training for bystanders, addressing micro-aggressions as part of the Mid-Career Faculty Leadership Program in 2020. The LIFT training program has been widely disseminated across the campus in part due to her work facilitating more than a dozen sessions for students, faculty and hospital leadership.

Ananthakrishnan has been active in medical student and resident education at the School since 2009. She has mentored hundreds of medical students as they travel through the residency application process consistently earning high praise including: “She is a role model for all educators having excelled in every educational domain including direct teaching, assessment, curriculum development and scholarship,” wrote the colleague in the letter of recommendation.

Ananthakrishnan currently serves as the Director of Student Education in the department of medicine and is the clerkship director to third-year students in the Medicine 1 clerkship. She has served as the faculty mentor for the Internal Medicine Interest Group at the School since 2012, the student-led group that plans activities designed to educate the student body on the field of Internal Medicine and its various subspecialties. She is an active national member of Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine.

Ananthakrishnan’s outpatient practice is in endocrinology, diabetes and nutrition at Boston Medical Center with a focus in neuroendocrinology. She works as the endocrine director of a multidisciplinary neuroendocrine group and is a Spanish-speaking provider.