Members elect TAFP leaders during Annual Session and Primary Care Summit

The TAFP Member Assembly elected the Academy’s officers, new members for the board of directors, and two representatives to the AAFP Congress of Delegates during this year’s Annual Session.

Earlier in the year, the TAFP Nominating Committee interviewed active members interested in each of the available positions and put forth a slate of candidates for consideration by delegates to the Member Assembly. The Residency Network and FMIG Network, representing residency programs and medical schools respectively, elected their candidates for the board of directors. The election was held at the Member Assembly meeting on Friday, November 10, 2023.

Terrance Hines, MD, was elected to serve as TAFP President for the coming year. He is the executive director and chief medical officer for University Health Services at the University of Texas at Austin. His practice emphasizes student health, gender care, and HIV prevention. He completed undergraduate and medical school at Texas A&M University and residency at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth. He has been recognized with the Austin Under 40 Award in Medicine and Health Care as well as the TAFP Special Constituency Leadership Award.

“I am humbled and honored to stand before you today,” Hines said in his inaugural speech to the Member Assembly. “Together, we can make a real difference in the lives of our patients and in the future of health care. Thank you for being a part of this journey, and I look forward to all we can achieve together.”

Lindsay Botsford, MD, MBA, CMQ, was elected to serve as the Academy’s president-elect. She is a market medical director with One Medical, where she leads their Houston practices and cares for older adults on Medicare in a value-based model. Her passions include health care transformation, quality, leadership development, and increasing joy in practice for the health care team. She is a graduate of Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine, and completed residency training at Baylor College of Medicine’s Kelsey-Seybold Clinic. She earned an MBA at the University of Houston.

Ike Okwuwa, MD, was elected to the office of treasurer. He serves as residency program director for the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center of the Permian Basin and is chairman of the board of directors for Permian Basin Health Network, a physician-hospital organization. He graduated from the University of Benin Medical School in Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria, and completed residency training at TTUHSCPB. He previously served as the new physician member and an at-large member on TAFP’s Board of Directors.

Adrian Billings, MD, PhD, of Alpine, was elected to serve as TAFP’s parliamentarian. He is the Chief Medical Officer of Preventative Care Health Services FQHC in the Big Bend, and he is the Associate Academic Dean of Rural and Community Engagement and Senior Fellow of the F. Marie Hall Institute for Rural and Community Health at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. He has been a career-long rural community physician along the Texas-Mexico border in West Texas. Billings is passionate about enabling rural-born and educated students’ opportunities to enroll in health care training programs.

Lane Aiena, MD, was elected to serve as an at-large director on the TAFP board. He is a family medicine physician in Huntsville, where he was awarded Citizen of the Year by The Huntsville Item for his work and advocacy in getting the COVID-19 vaccine to his county and organizing mass vaccination events. He earned his undergraduate degree from Louisiana State University and his medical degree from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. He has served two terms as the new physician director on the board. Aiena won the TAFP Political Action Committee award in 2019, and the TAFP Public Health Award in 2022.

Donald R. Niño, MD, was elected to the other open at-large position on the TAFP board of directors. He is a board-certified family medicine specialist in practice in Channelview, Texas since 1986. He was born in Houston and received his BSEE in Biomedical Engineering from Rice University in 1979. He received his medical degree from UT Houston/McGovern Medical School in 1983. He completed his family medicine residency at Memorial Medical Center in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1986. He has been president of the Harris County Academy of Family Physicians and was selected to be the Distinguished Alumnus of UT Houston/McGovern Medical School in 1999. He was selected as the Family Physician of the Year by TAFP in 2001. Dr. Niño holds academic appointments at McGovern Medical School and at Tillman J. Fertitta College of Medicine at the University of Houston.

Amanda Mohammed-Strait, MD, was elected to serve as the new physician member of the board of directors. She is a board-certified family physician practicing in Dallas. She graduated from Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica, West Indies in 2015. She completed her family medicine residency training in Dallas at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Parkland Hospital in 2018. She has an International Medicine and Public Health Diploma, serves on the Young Professionals Advisory Council for the HIV/AIDS Resource Center Dallas, is a Texas Children in Nature Board member, and has served on several TAFP committees. She was named the TAFP Humanitarian of the Year in 2021.

Sherri Onyiego, MD, PhD, was elected to serve as the advocate for diversity and health equity on the TAFP board of directors. She is the Texas Market Medical Director at Equality Health. She is a family physician with more than 15 years of experience in patient care, population health, health disparities, health equity, and value-based care. Her career has ranged from practicing community medicine serving high-risk populations, academic medicine mentoring students and residents, to public health focusing on chronic disease prevention services and responding to public health emergencies. Onyiego earned her PhD from Meharry Medical College, MD degree from Ross University School of Medicine, and a fellowship from the University of Texas in Houston. She is a board chair for the Harris County Academy of Family Physician and a member of the Texas Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Review Committee.

Kasie Okonkwo, MD, was elected to serve as the resident director on the TAFP board. She is a PGY 3 family medicine resident at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. She attended Prairie View A&M University and completed medical school at Ross University School of Medicine.

Kathryn Baker was elected to serve as the student director on the TAFP board. She is a fourth-year medical student at the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at TCU. Originally from North Carolina, she traveled to Texas for her undergraduate degree at LeTourneau University, where an opportunity to shadow in a rural overseas mission hospital sparked her interest in family medicine. After sticking around Texas for medical school, she has continued to pursue a career in family medicine and is excited to serve as the student chair for TAFP in 2024.

K. Ashok Kumar, MD, a past president of TAFP, was elected to be a delegate to the AAFP Congress of Delegates. He was born in a small town in India. After completing medical school, he went to England for higher studies, then to Tyler, Texas in 1992, for his family medicine residency training at UT Health Center at Tyler. Immediately after completing residency, he started a solo private practice in Hugo, Oklahoma. In 1997 he moved back to Tyler and joined the family medicine residency program as faculty. In 2004, he moved to San Antonio to serve as faculty at the Medical School Department of Family Medicine, where he now mentors medical students and residents to do community service.

Emily Briggs, MD, MPH, was elected to serve as one of TAFP’s alternate delegates to the AAFP Congress of Delegates. She is the founder of Briggs Family Medicine, where she practices full-spectrum family medicine and obstetrics, and she has been the medical director for two New Braunfels school districts. She has served as the new physician board member for both TAFP and AAFP. She has served as president of her county medical society, the Alamo Chapter of TAFP, and as TAFP President in 2022-2023. She received her Bachelor of Science from Texas A&M University, her master’s in public health from the University of Houston School of Public Health, and her medical degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. She completed residency at Christus Santa Rosa in San Antonio.