Each year, ACEP’s Council elects new leaders for the College at its meeting. The Council, which represents all 53 chapters, 40 sections of membership, the Association of Academic Chairs of Emergency Medicine, the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors, the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association, and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, will elect four members to the ACEP Board of Directors when it meets in September, along with a new President-Elect.

The candidates for Board of Directors will be featured in the September 2024 issue of ACEP Now.

Candidates for ACEP President-Elect responded to this prompt:

How will you mitigate the threat of losing members of the College when encountering divisive topics that may make large portions of the membership feel alienated or disenfranchised?

L. Anthony Cirillo, MD, FACEP

Current Professional Positions: EM residency-trained emergency physician working clinically as a Regional Traveler; Director of Government Affairs, US Acute Care Solutions

Internships and Residency: Transitional internship, George Washington University Hospital; emergency medicine residency, UMASS Medical Center, Co-Chief Resident

Medical Degree: MD, University of Vermont College of Medicine (1990)

Response: Sometimes, in order to see clearly into the future, you have to look to the past. On August 16, 1968, John Wiegenstein, MD, and seven other emergency physicians met in Lansing, MI and founded ACEP. The founders had come together with a singular goal to “facilitate the exchange of information among physicians practicing emergency medicine.”

The founding of ACEP seems so long ago, and you might think that it was easy to start the specialty of emergency medicine back then, since those were “simpler times.” The reality of 1968 however, was anything but simple, and historians have deemed 1968 to be the “worst year of the 20th century.” 1968 saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Bobby Kennedy, which prompted month long violent riots in Washington, DC, Chicago, and Baltimore. The Vietnam War escalated with the Tet Offensive. Another wave of riots occurred in Chicago after the Democratic National Convention. Governor George Wallace of Alabama ran as the American Independent Party candidate on a segregationist platform winning electoral college votes of five states in the Presidential election. And yet, despite this turmoil, Apollo 8 successfully orbited the moon, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed and signed into law by President Johnson, and yes, the American College of Emergency Physicians was founded.