Primary Care Week

2026 Bellue-Holly Distinguished Visiting Professor – Primary Care Week

Hosted by the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Primary Care Week celebrates the impact of primary care through events and activities open to students, faculty, and staff.

Dr. Robert M. Centor’s speaker session title:
Thinking Like a Clinician: Advancing Clinical Reasoning in Medical Education

Dr. Centor graduated from the MCV/VCU in 1975, completing his residency there. He joined the faculty, serving first as residency program director and then division chief. He moved to UAB in 1993, starting the Division of GIM and serving as Associate Dean for Primary Care. From 2004-2017 he was the Regional Dean of the Huntsville Campus. His current title is Professor-Emeritus, but he still does ward attending at the Birmingham VA Hospital three months each year. He has served many societies in leadership positions, including Chair of the Board of Regents for ACP. In 2017 he won both the SGIM Glaser Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to research, education, leadership and mentoring in generalism, and the Ellen Gregg Ingalls/UAB National Alumni Society Award for Lifetime Achievement in Teaching. He also received the Jane F. Desforges Distinguished Teacher Award from the American College of Physicians in 2020 and the UAB Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 2021.

Dr. Centor’s main research interest has focused on adolescent and young adult pharyngitis. He has also published on medical education, including a series of articles focusing on what students and residents desire from ward attending rounds in Internal Medicine. He has a major interest in diagnostic reasoning and has published several clinical problem-solving cases in NEJM, JGIM, JHM and Am J Med Sci. He currently hosts the Annals on Call Podcast and co-hosts a Zoom conference, (un)Remarkable Labs. He has appeared on many other podcasts including The Curbsiders and The Clinical Problem Solvers.