Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.
Mother Theresa
Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.
Mother Theresa
Sister Mary Diana Dreger is a member of the Dominican Sisters of the Congregation of St. Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as a practicing internal medicine physician. Since 2007, she has worked with The Holy Family Health Center, an affiliate of Saint Thomas Medical Partners. In addition to caring for her patients who are predominantly uninsured immigrants, as the only physician on-site, she supervises nurse practitioners and participates actively in the management of the clinic and formation of the staff.
She graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School in 2001, and completed her residency in internal medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2004. She holds a faculty appointment with Vanderbilt as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine and Public Health.
In this role she is a preceptor with medical students for rotations in primary care and supervises internal medicine residents in their continuity clinic at Holy Family. Sister Mary Diana has become proficient in Spanish in order to serve the largely Hispanic population of the clinic, where the staff, providers, and students are all bilingual. Sister is board-certified with the American Board of Internal Medicine and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.
She has been a member of the Dominicans for over 25 years. Before entering the community, she was a biology major at Cornell University, and then completed her degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a concentration in secondary education. She completed a Master of Arts in mathematics at Stony Brook in 1987. Sister then taught at the high school and college levels, before discerning her vocation to religious life. In Nashville, she has also been involved in administration at Saint Cecilia Academy, and was a member of the Aquinas College Board of Directors. She is currently working toward completion of a Master of Arts in moral theology with Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.
Sister became an active participant in the Catholic Medical Association (CMA) in 2006. She was a founding member of the Nashville Guild of the CMA in 2008 and has served as an officer for the local guild for six years. She became an advisor to the president and a member of the board of directors of the CMA at the national level in 2014, and serves as chair of the Linacre Quarterly Committee, providing strategic oversight for the official journal of the CMA. She is a member of the national CMA speaker's bureau, and has presented over 100 talks across the country and in Canada on topics related to education, medicine, faith, and ethics to high school, college, parish, clergy, and medical audiences. She has presented twice at the Annual Educational Conference of the CMA on topics related to the faithful practice of the Catholic physician, was invited to speak twice to the Christian Community Health Fellowship national meeting, and has spoken at several secular medical meetings including for the Program in Professionalism and Ethics at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She completed the National Catholic Bioethics Center certification program with distinction in 2011, and her paper "Autonomy Trumps All" was published in 2012 by the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly.