Manyon Appointed as Chair of the Department of Family Medicine

I am pleased to share that Andrea T. Manyon, MD, has been appointed as chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. She has successfully led the department as interim chair for the past year.

Her leadership in clinical service, education and research will be key as she works to optimize opportunities for scholarship; build the professional repertoire of our faculty, residents and medical students; and strengthen our primary care services and community needs, especially in the medically underserved areas of the region.

She has held several significant positions related to enhancing primary care in Western New York and New York State including as president and CEO of UBMD Family Medicine, professor of family medicine at the Jacobs School, and leadership roles for the family medicine service line at Kaleida Health and the network committee with Great Lakes Integrated Network. She is also chief of service for family medicine at Erie County Medical Center.

Highly respected in her field, Dr. Manyon also serves as chair of the board of directors for the Academic Health Professionals Insurance Association where she led a strategic planning process which significantly shifted the company financially.

She first came to the Jacobs School in 1995 as creator and director of one of the country’s earliest clinical skills courses for first-year medical students, a program for which she continues to devote her focus.    

In between, she was recruited as chair of the Department of Family Medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, where she helped significantly increase its grant portfolio and solidified the research team. She also served as a visiting professor and dissertation advisor at the University of Crete School of Medicine’s Department of Family and Social Medicine in Greece for three years.

Prior to that, Dr. Manyon also was an attending at Kaleida Health, a UBMD Family Medicine physician partner and medical director of DeGraff Family Medicine. She also spent eight years as a rural family physician in Gowanda, NY. 

In addition to practicing for nearly 30 years, Dr. Manyon oversees the Jacobs School Department of Family Medicine’s Primary Care Research Institute, the largest health services research group at UB which has ranked sixth across the university in direct funding over the last five years.

She has conducted research as principal investigator, co-investigator, or project director in clinical operations, medical education, qualitative methods and workforce development. Her work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and has resulted in numerous presentations and publications.

Dr. Manyon earned her bachelor’s degree with honors in biology-chemistry from Skidmore College and her medical degree from the Jacobs School where she trained in family medicine, serving as chief resident at Buffalo General Hospital.

Following residency, she completed a fellowship in academic faculty development at the Jacobs School.

She remains very active in the community, having served in leadership roles with HealthNow New York’s Foundation for Healthy Living and the Hellenic Orthodox Church of the Annunciation. 

She was recipient of the Jacobs School’s Department of Family Medicine Excellence in Medical Student Education award for 2003-2004.

I am thrilled that Dr. Manyon has accepted this important role within the Jacobs School. She is recognized at the local, state and national level as uniquely qualified to lead the department to its next level of excellence.