Group Peer Mentoring Program

Kimberly Bloom-Feshbach, M.D., is an Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medical Center in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Section of Hospital Medicine and co-leads the Group Peer Mentoring Program. Dr. Bloom-Feshbach graduated from Yale University, summa cum laude, with a BA in Religious Studies and worked as an epidemiological researcher in the Division of Epidemiology and Population Studies of the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, collaborating with researchers at the Statens Serum Institut and Roskilde University in Denmark. She obtained her medical degree from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, followed by Internal Medicine Internship and Residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty at Weill Cornell Medicine. As a physician, medical educator and investigator, Dr. Bloom-Feshbach designs and evaluates communication and mentoring strategies with the goals of increasing humanism, vitality, and diversity in medicine. She enjoys caring for hospitalized patients at NewYork-Presbyterian/Cornell Medical Center and Lower Manhattan. In addition, Dr. Bloom-Feshbach is a co-investigator with the C-Change Mentoring and Leadership Study, a 5-year NIH-funded study based out of Brandeis. At Weill Cornell, she designs and evaluates medical education curricula from the medical student through faculty development level. She directs the Patient Care and Physicianship curriculum for pre-clinical second year medical students and serves as the Director of the Virtual Hospitalist Program at Weill Cornell and the Associate Director of Medical Services at NewYork-Presbyterian/Westchester Behavioral Health Center. Dr. Bloom-Feshbach is also Senior Faculty with Vital Talk, teaching serious illness communication skills to clinicians at Weill Cornell and beyond.

Swana De Gijsel, M.D., is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Section of Hospital Medicine and co-leads the Group Peer Mentoring Program. Dr. Gijsel graduated from medical school at the University of Amsterdam and completed her residency training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine Montefiore Medical Center in the Primary Care and Social medicine program. She provides direct patient care at NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital and works with residents and medical students at the Weill Cornell campus on the Upper East Side. She deeply cares about effective and empathic communication with patients, providers, and within organizations. As faculty of the Academy of Communication, she leads communication workshops and Train-the-Trainer programs. She provides coaching and leads reflection groups focusing on professional identity and well-being to health care providers. In her academic time, she leads process groups for residents and fellows, and she has a passion for food and nutrition and developed a culinary medicine elective for medical students where she teaches nutrition in a professional kitchen and collaborates with chefs and nutritionists.