She is one of the most accomplished investigators in emergency medicine. Both she and the research division she has built at Mount Sinai are consistently ranked in the top five in the country in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. Her research focuses on issues of health care access, quality, and equity. She has designed innovative models of emergency care to improve patient outcomes, as well as novel emergency department-based care coordination and care transition interventions to support population health initiatives.

Dr. Richardson is also one of our specialty’s most respected research mentors. She directed one of the original emergency medicine K12 programs and leads the first T32 program awarded in emergency care research. She serves as a senior health policy advisor for the EMF.

Dr. Richardson has made highly influential contributions to eliminating health care disparities in both the research and policy arenas. She is a member of the New York City Board of Health, the first emergency physician ever to serve in that board’s more than 150-year history. She serves on the Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) of the Centers for Disease Control and is the current chair of the ACD Health Disparities Subcommittee. A former recipient of the ACEP Colin C. Rorrie, Jr. Award for Excellence in Health Policy, she has also been honored by ACEP as a Hero of Emergency Medicine and with a New York ACEP Chapter Improving Emergency Care Award. In 2016, Dr. Richardson was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Honorary Membership Award

Marjorie Geist, RN, PhD, CAE
During her 20 years as a nurse, Dr. Geist was an emergency nurse in three county emergency departments and taught emergency nursing at the University of Texas at Austin. During her 27 years at ACEP, Marjorie staffed numerous committees, sections, and task forces in the education, practice management, and academic affairs departments. She served as staff academic liaison to the Review Committee for Emergency Medicine, SAEM, the Council for Emergency Medicine Residency Directors, the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association, and ABEM. She also implemented ACEP’s academic and research educational meetings: Teaching Fellowship, Emergency Medicine Basic Research Skills, and Research Forum (EMBRS).

Honorary Membership Award

Barbara M. Tomar, MPH
From March 2002 until her retirement in June 2017, Ms. Tomar was ACEP’s federal affairs director in the Washington, D.C., office. She was responsible for addressing policies affecting emergency physicians and their patients on the federal regulatory front. The major challenge of her tenure was the Affordable Care Act of 2010, which, weighing in at over 2,000 pages, spawned another 20,000 pages of regulations over a four-year roll-out. Ms. Tomar also staffed several ACEP committees and task forces, the Emergency Medicine Action Fund, and two sections, as well as serving for 15 years as Council reference committee staff.