Shawn J. Bird, MD, Receives AANEM's 2024 Jun Kimura Outstanding Educator Award

The Jun Kimura Outstanding Educator Award recognizes members for their significant contributions related to NM and EDX medicine education. Due to his numerous NM and EDX-related contributions, Dr. Bird was selected to receive the 2024 Jun Kimura Outstanding Educator Award.

Dr. Bird’s career began when he received his electrical engineering and biology undergraduate degrees from Cornell University. He obtained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1983 and completed his neurology residency at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “I enjoyed the field immensely when I did a rotation for several months in the EMG lab at Penn as a neurology resident. That is what drew me to it in the first place. I saw from my mentors how even more enjoyable the EMG lab is while teaching at the bedside - passing on that knowledge to other trainees.” 

For the next two years, he did a fellowship in NMDs and EMG at the University of Pennsylvania and was mentored in EMG by Dr. Austin Sumner. Dr. Bird credits his collaboration and mentorship with Dr. Sumner as a motivation for him, “I was especially motivated by Dr. Sumner, who was able to uniquely bring the clinical and electrophysiologic correlations to life in patients with neuropathy. His approach to the patient in the EMG lab is something that I have tried to aspire to throughout my career.” After his training, Dr. Bird was appointed the medical director of the EMG laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.

He has remained on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and was promoted to professor in 2011. Dr. Bird has been chief of the NM division there since 2017, in addition to serving as director of the EMG laboratory and director of the Myasthenia Gravis Clinic. He was the program director for the clinical neurophysiology fellowship program at the University of Pennsylvania from 1997 to 2012 and served as program director of the NM fellowship program from 2013 to 2021. As the lead educator in the EMG laboratory, he has mentored over 50 fellows in EDX medicine, which he says is his proudest accomplishment, noting, “Most of [them] have gone on to mentor the next generation in NM and EDX medicine in other academic institutions.” 

In the future, Dr. Bird wants to impact even more young physicians. “I plan to continue to focus my efforts on training our fellows to be superb EDX clinicians and to try to pass on that enthusiasm for the bedside physiology to others when they move on. One of my goals is to expose our neurology residents earlier in their residency to the exciting fields of NM and EDX medicine so they can be drawn to our subspecialty when they pursue fellowship training.” 

His academic efforts have focused on the interface between NM medicine and clinical electrophysiology. He and his colleagues wrote extensively about critical illness myopathy and were the first to demonstrate the basic abnormality in critical myopathy was that the muscle membrane was electrically inexcitable. They developed a novel technique to direct muscle stimulation as a bedside tool in the ICU diagnosis of that disorder. He and his colleagues wrote an editorial in Muscle & Nerve, coining the term “critical illness myopathy” for this disorder and defining its diagnostic criteria. He has authored 46 peer-reviewed articles and over 50 editorials and chapters.