Abigail R Solitro, PhD

Biosketch

Abigail Solitro has served in higher education since 2018, beginning as an undergraduate educator and transitioning to her current role as a medical educator at WMed in 2023. She currently serves as the course director for Fundamentals of Biomedical Sciences 1, the initial course in the Foundations of Medicine pre-clerkship curriculum, which applies biochemistry and nutrition disciplines to clinical contexts including diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome. In addition, she serves as the course director for the Principles of Medicine 1 course, exploring prominent issues in health systems science, and the Advances and Perspectives in Medicine course within the Master of Biomedical Sciences program. She is the biochemistry and nutrition disciplines director, coordinating competency-based training throughout all four years of the MD program. Within nutrition, Abigail serves as WMed’s nutrition champion in their partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services to innovate and advance nutrition in medical education. Lastly, she serves as the faculty mentor for the Lifestyle Medicine Concentration within the Well-Being in Medicine Distinction Program.

Outside of WMed, Abigail serves on the Educational Resource Development Committee for the Association of Biochemistry Educators, collaborating to develop case-based, biochemistry-focused teaching materials for health professions educators. She also serves as the secretary for the Michigan Medical Nutrition Education Consortium, a collaboration between the seven medical schools in Michigan to advance nutrition education across the state.

Abigail’s passion lies in lifestyle medicine, educating and equipping members of the community to adopt evidence-based lifestyle habits to prevent, manage, and even remit chronic disease. To this end, her scholarship focuses on developing open-access educational resources applying biochemistry and nutrition to clinical practice, assessing the efficacy and sustained impact of community lifestyle medicine programs, and assessing the efficacy of active learning approaches in the classroom.