David Satin MD – Faculty Advisor Biosketch 2010
Dr. Satin is an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health.
He cares for a largely underserved population, practicing and supervising residents at Smiley’s
Clinic, the University of Minnesota Medical Center’s family medicine residency program. He is a
long-time Master Tutor in the Essentials of Clinical Medicine course (previously in PAS and
PAP1). Within the Department of Family Medicine, Dr. Satin applies his research towards
clinical quality improvement.
Dr. Satin completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota’s Center for
Bioethics following his residency at the University’s Department of Family Medicine and
Community Health, medical school at the University of Western Ontario (Canada), a Robert
Jones scholarship in Philosophy to the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), a philosophy
degree from the University of Western Ontario, and a health sciences degree from
Marianopolis College in his home town of Montreal, Canada.
Dr. Satin conducts empirical research and synthesizes the literature around themes of consent and
ethical issues in quality improvement. He has collaborated as co-investigator on grants such as
“Information-Seeking and Decision-Making Preferences Among Orthodontic Patients: An
Elective Health Care Model” and “A National Survey of Medical Ethics Education in Family
Medicine Residency Programs.”
His most recent research in quality improvement regards ethical issues in performance-based
quality improvement incentive programs such as pay-for-performance. In 2009, Dr. Satin was a
visiting professor on this topic at the University of California Davis and the University of
Louisville. He currently sits on several American Medical Association work groups designing
performance measures for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In his spare time, Dr. Satin enjoys spending time with his wife (Dr. Suzan Ekim from the
Department of Orthodontics), lifting weights, scuba-diving (he had a brief stint as a Divemaster in
the Turks and Caicos Islands), mowing his lawn, snow-blowing his driveway, and watching
science fiction or reality TV with his cats Miles and Maury.