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Meet our Speakers

Robert Pallay is Program and Residency Director in Family Medicine at Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah, Georgia, as well as Professor and Chair, Department of Family Medicine, Mercer University School of Medicine, Savannah Campus. Prior to this, he was in clinical practice, both as owner/manager of a private group practice, and as Medical Director in the Department of Family Medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, where he served as Vice-Chairman from 2002 -2005. Since 1975, Dr. Pallay has served on, and chaired, numerous committees and commissions, and held officer positions in the New Jersey Academy of Family Physicians (NJAFP), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American College of Sports

Medicine (ACSM), and the Medical Society of New Jersey (MSNJ). In 1999, he was appointed by New Jersey Governor Whitman to the New Jersey Public Health Council, and served as its Chairman for four years. He was on the N.J. Governor’s Bioterrorism Task Force, as well as the Advisory Task Force on Bioterrorism for the AAFP. In the AAFP, he served on its Finance Commission, and chaired its Commission on Public Health. In 2005, Dr. Pallay was elected to the Board of Directors of the AAFP for a three-year term. He has established a strong record of accomplishment with all of these organizations as both consultant and advocate for integrating fitness, sports medicine, cultural diversity, and the clinical practice of medicine and public health. Throughout his career, Dr. Pallay has been involved in many entrepreneurial ventures, including new medical practices, an urgent care facilities company, and other medical device and Pharmaceutical-related companies. Since 2007, he has been in Savannah where he has been in charge of the Family Medicine Residency and Department of Family Medicine at Mercer. The FM Residency is a 3-yr program that graduates six residents each June. Those graduates have taken positions providing outpatient care, as hospitalists in large and small hospitals, and in academics, mostly in Georgia and across the Southeast. However, they are also in Texas, California, the Midwest and the Northeast. Today the program has an associated fellowship in Sports Medicine and soon will add a fellowship in Family Medicine Obstetrics. The hope is that graduates of this program will be able to set up practices in rural Southeast Georgia that will bring much-needed full scope Family Medicine care to these patients and enable us to reverse the present situation that has led to Georgia being among the worst maternal and newborn care and outcomes in the nation. Robert Pallay, M.D.

Program Director Family Medicine Residency Memorial Health University Medical Center Email: Robert.pallay@hcahealthcare.com

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