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Training future generations of family physicians.

Why Choose Family Medicine?

Family medicine physicians provide comprehensive, continuous healthcare to all members of the family throughout the course of their lives. By building relationships based on communication and respect, these physicians gain a deeper understanding of the whole person, including the range of physical, emotional and socioeconomic factors that influence a person’s health status.

The Department of Family & Community Medicine integrates biological, clinical and behavioral sciences to train our physicians to provide outstanding levels of patient-centered and culturally appropriate care.

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Education

Faculty Spotlight

Santina J G Wheat

Associate Professor of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Wheat is the Program Director for the McGaw Northwestern Family Medicine Residency Erie Humboldt Park. This program is a Teaching Health Center Program that serves a largely Spanish speaking patient population at Erie Family Health Center a Federally Qualified Health Center in Chicago.  She earned her medical degree at University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine and her Masters of Public Health at University of Illinois School of Public Health. She completed a family medicine residency at McGaw Northwestern Family Medicine Residency Humboldt Park. She currently primarily provides fu...

Adiba N Khan

Instructor of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Adiba Khan graduated from McGaw Northwestern Family Medicine Residency at Lake Forest. During her residency training, she completed the Northwestern Medical Education Clinical Scholars program and served as chief resident.​ In addition to a strong interest in full spectrum family medicine, Dr. Khan has a special interest in women's health, reproductive health, and medical education.

Robert A Chase

Clinical Instructor of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Chase has over thirty years’ experience in healthcare. He has particular clinical expertise in infectious diseases, infection control, clinical epidemiology, and population health.

Michael K Rakotz

Clinical Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Rakotz oversees efforts to prevent cardiovascular disease for the American Medical Association. A practicing family physician for more than 20 years, Dr. Rakotz recently served as the Director of Population Health and Virtual Medicine at Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group. In 2014, his office was one of 30 sites in the U.S.to earn the designation as a Million Hearts® Hypertension Control Champion. In addition to his position in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, he is a Fellow for the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology (HIT).

Kiran Joshi

Clinical Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine

Interests include quality improvement, global health, community based participatory research.

Jeffrey M Panzer

Clinical Instructor of Family and Community Medicine

Family physician at Erie Family Health Center.

Noman Shahid

Instructor of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Shahid is board certified in family medicine and palliative medicine. He completed his residency at University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria and fellowship training at Rush University Medical Center. Dr. Shahid’s clinical interests include: caring for seriously ill patients, hospital medicine, addiction medicine, and primary care. He believes in a life of service, and strives to provide comprehensive and compassionate care to his patients. He is thrilled to share his love of teaching, learning, and building long lasting patient relationships at Northwestern.

Katherine Wright

Research Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Wright's research examines the effectiveness of health and education policy measures while considering the mediating and moderating factors that influence population metrics. Within this context, she has also developed new methodological approaches to account for missing data, and has extensively analyzed large scale data such as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

Frances C Baxley

Instructor of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Frances Baxley currently specializes in family medicine. She completed her medical education at Harvard Medical School and completed her residency training at University of California, San Francisco. She has written a publication for the Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine Journal and for the PRIMER journal of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine. She serves on the Board of Directors for the HealthCare Foundation of Northern Lake County. She is also fluent in Spanish. 

Jessica D Lapinski

Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Jessica Lapinski completed her residency in Family Medicine in 2019 at Duke University in the Department of Community and Family Medicine. She served as the Education Chief resident from 2017 - 2018 and then as the Population Health Chief resident from 2018 - 2019. She is a 2016 graduate of A.T. Still University-Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, where she completed a fellowship in Medical Education. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010, where she obtained a bachelor of science in biology, a bachelor of arts in psychology and studied abroad at Lancaster...

Our Community

Our multiple affiliated care sites offer unique training experiences and comprehensive patient care.

Starzl Academy

Former trainee - Luisa Morales Nebreda, MD

Physician-Scientist Training & Resources

We offer a wide range of resources, mentorship opportunities and training to help our residents excel as physician-scientists. Explore all of the resources and hear from housestaff who are making research a major part of their career development plans.

VISIT THE STARZL ACADEMY SITE

Health Equity

Our vision is to make Northwestern, our communities, all communities, our lives and the world a better place — with everyone having the chance and responsibility for reaching their own pinnacle of health

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