On a mission to transform medical education
From precision education to accelerated pathways to AI, Drs. Jennifer Kogan and Ilene Rosen are exploring new ways to train tomorrow’s physicians.
The Perelman School of Medicine was where Jennifer R. Kogan, MD, and Ilene M. Rosen, MD, MSCE, first donned their white coats as nervous new medical students, and where they proudly graduated with their medical degrees in 1995 and 1993, respectively. What they didn’t realize then was that they’d found a long-term home at Penn Medicine: an environment that would continue to challenge and inspire them throughout their training and careers.
Now both physicians are in new leadership roles and ready to shape the future of medical education for the next generation of Penn Medicine students and postgraduate trainees: Kogan started as the vice dean for Undergraduate Medical Education (UME) in July 2025, while Rosen was named associate dean for Graduate Medical Education (GME) and vice president for GME in January 2025.
Their appointments mark a new organizational structure that breaks down traditional siloes between resources for medical students and doctors continuing their training after medical school in residency and fellowship programs.
“We wanted to leverage the continuum between undergraduate and graduate medical education,” said Lisa M. Bellini, MD, executive vice dean of the Perelman School of Medicine and SVP of Academic Affairs for the University of Pennsylvania Health System, who now oversees both positions. “And with Dr. Kogan’s and Dr. Rosen’s expertise, we will be able to create some paradigms for medical education that fit with our strategic plan, so that’s really exciting. I feel like this is a new era in education.”
Distinguished clinicians and educators
Bellini said that Kogan and Rosen were chosen for their roles because they are exceptional clinicians and teachers—both have won numerous awards, including the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching—and have a deep understanding of Penn Medicine culture.
For Kogan, a primary care general internist, the decision to build her career at Penn Medicine was easy.
“I stayed at Penn Medicine because of the people—they are phenomenal clinicians, outstanding educators, and innovators,” said Kogan, the William Maul Measey President’s Distinguished Professor in Medical Education. “I think this is the best place to learn to be a doctor, and I actually think it’s the best place to receive health care.”
After her training, Kogan started as assistant director for Penn’s Internal Medicine clerkship. She later founded and directed Penn Medicine’s Measey Medical Education Fellowship, the Medical Education Area of Concentration program, and the Measey Primary Care Pathway Program. Most recently, she served as senior associate dean for UME.
Kogan, a former psychology major who was a faculty inductee in the Gold Humanism Honor Society, cares deeply about fostering mental health and wellness. Several years ago, she served as the faculty advisor to a student-created Academic Resilience Team, which supported students who were experiencing struggles.
She is also an internationally recognized scholar in assessment. Her interest in assessment was inspired by her desire for more feedback during her own training. That led her to study variability in assessment and to create new assessment tools—work that would inform her later roles in medical education leadership.
Kogan’s counterpart in transforming training for new doctors is Rosen, an associate professor of Sleep Medicine and a renowned scholar in fatigue management and competency-based training in sleep medicine. Rosen felt drawn to medical education early on. As chief resident, she relished the job of creating learning opportunities for her colleagues.
“I was finding a lot of passion in the med ed space and viewing whatever I was doing clinically as the framework in which I did my teaching,” said Rosen, who later earned a master’s degree in clinical epidemiology at Penn.
A former neuroscience major, Rosen became an influential leader in the sleep medicine field, serving as past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). Her focus on sleep medicine meshed well with her teaching interest because she quickly realized that everyone, from medical students to primary care doctors to patients, could use more education around healthy sleep and sleep disorders. In June 2025, AASM honored her with the Excellence in Education Award.
Since starting her new role overseeing GME, Rosen has been busy. In addition to ushering in a new class of interns and fellows, she oversaw the transfer of residents displaced from the shutdown of Crozer Health to a new Family Medicine residency at Chester County Hospital. The program, which was already in the works, launched a year early to accommodate the new residents.
“I view this role as one that is of service to the health system and community,” Rosen said. “Education is one of our three main missions, and I believe my job is to help elevate that mission and get it the recognition it deserves.”
A shared vision to innovate medical education
Some students and postgraduate trainees might need more or less time to master certain concepts and skills, and Kogan and Rosen are eager to explore how to individualize learning across the medical education continuum. Penn Medicine is increasing the use of Individualized Learning Plans—by which medical students outline their goals and plans to achieve them—but Kogan and Rosen hope to advance that concept even farther.
“I am really interested in this idea of precision education, where you tailor training and experiences to a particular learner,” Kogan said. “With artificial intelligence and other ways to aggregate data, we have this incredible opportunity to collect data beyond just knowledge-based assessments that allows us to know what a learner can and cannot do. We can use that data to provide feedback and coaching about clinical skills and adjust clinical experiences to align with where students need to grow and improve.”
The precision education concept could lead to accelerated training pathways for some students, residents, and even fellows, reducing the cost of medical education and helping address the looming physician shortage. Given that approximately 30 percent of Penn’s medical students stay at Penn for residency, that group could provide a pool of trainees who might pilot an accelerated approach, Rosen noted. Creating additional residency slots for an accelerated program would be another way to address the physician shortage.
Setting up such accelerated pathways will require careful planning and additional technology and infrastructure support so that program leaders can measure how each trainee is progressing, and clinical units are staffed appropriately to avoid disrupting patient care.
“We feel that Penn Medicine should be the learning lab for the best way to train physicians,” Rosen said. “Our vision is to leverage the medical education continuum to train individuals better and potentially faster and truly realize the value of competency-based education.”
For Kogan, one of those “faster” elements is a hope that medical students can get more clinical exposure with patients in their first year. “Right now, our students do shadowing, engage in community clinics, and work with standardized patients to learn clinical skills, but they’re not embedded in the clinical environment,” she said. “I think we have a great opportunity to move clinical training earlier.”
Continuing to support mental health for students, residents, and fellows is also key. There are plans to reinvigorate the Wellness Committee, and students will be required to set wellness goals as part of their Individualized Learning Plans, Kogan said. Rosen works closely with a group of leaders on the House Staff Council as well as program directors to build community and address systemic factors to promote wellness.
Other ideas are also percolating. While the medical school and certain residency programs offer coaching to learners who need more support, Rosen would love to see every learner paired with a coach. “Expanding coaching across the continuum would be another step towards precision education and make us a really novel place to learn and train,” she said.
However, it takes financial resources to create the infrastructure to grow and sustain precision education, leverage technology in medical education, and provide training flexibility and coaching—plus additional research funding to study what works. In this challenging funding climate, philanthropy continues to be crucial to pilot and sustain innovative programming.
Still, it is an exciting time to realize new possibilities for Penn Medicine, both leaders said.
“We’re trying to lead in the evolution of medical education,” Rosen said. “We want to make sure that when people think about the University of Pennsylvania, they think: ‘That’s where the cutting-edge, best medical training happens,’ and that everyone is looking to us for what’s next.”