Maria A. Basile, MD, MBA, is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Family, Population, and Preventive Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook. Dr. Basile, serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics where her work focuses on human values and professional identity formation. An award winning poet, surgeon and medical educator, Dr. Basile is a dynamic and respected physician leader for more than 3 decades. As a founding member of the WPLA, Dr. Basile has served in multiple roles as a participant, workgroup member and chair, as well as faculty. Chairing subgroups as diverse as Advocacy, Physician Wellness and Resilience, and Networking, Dr Basile has contributed lectures on governmental affairs and advocacy and wellness-centered leadership. Dr. Basile is passionately involved with organized medicine and is the only woman to have served as President of the Suffolk County Medical Society twice, unmatched in her talent for building community partnerships. She served as Vice-speaker and Commissioner of Communications for the Medical Society of the State of New York and is a Delegate from New York to the American Medical Association. Dr. Basile was inducted in May 2025 as a Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, one of the oldest Medical Societies in America. Dr. Basile’s poetry has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. She is the author of two chapbook poetry collections, Minimally Invasive: poems from a life in surgery and New, Not New: 15 things I’d like to know when I see you after quarantine. Her work has been published in literary and peer reviewed medical journals and anthologized with the creative writing of physicians and other caregivers. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Medical Humanities.