The Cheryl Jones Award, formerly, MiDPA PA of the Year, is presented to the Physician Assistant or Nurse Practitioner nominated and elected by their peers as having done outstanding work over the past year in their field.
The award is now named to honor the foundress of our state chapter, Cheryl Jones.
Early physician assistants had to work hard at getting acknowledged as a valuable provider of medical care.
She recognized over 15 years ago that there was a need to educate the medical and lay community about physician assistants. There was also a need to foster the physician assistant’s access to education, most especially at the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) meetings.
There were already forward thinking PAs working to make this happen, such as Joe Monroe, the founder of the Society of Dermatology Physician Assistants.
Ms. Jones recognized that it was the right time for Michigan Dermatology PAs to organize and join the movement. With a lot of hard work and help from a small core team, the first annual MiDPA educational conference took place and was well supported. Ms. Jones served as President of our Board and then stayed on as adjunct support for many years taking an active role in organizing the annual conference.
Since then, our conferences have continued to be successful, and well supported by our physician partners.
MiDPA went on to be recognized by the Michigan Academy of Physician Assistants (MAPA) as the first clinical specialty group. We are proud that our membership continues to grow each year.
Past honorees are:
- 2014 Jalal Alghabra, PA-C
- 2015 Beth Belesky, PA-C
- 2016 Sara Wilchowski, PA-C
- 2017 Jenny Pateryn, PA-C and Radha Sampat PA-C
- 2018 Andrea Rosik, PA-C
- 2019 Jesse Kogelman, PA-C
- 2022 Kristen Meyer, PA-C
- 2023 Jayme Heim, FNP-BC