Dr. Cassara has lived on Long Island his entire life. His interest in EM started when he learned about “emergency pregnancy” and other medical emergencies by reading his older brother’s nursing textbooks at the age of 10. In college, he volunteered with the Stony Brook Volunteer Ambulance Corps and acquired certification as an EMT, which formally introduced him to EM. He chose EM as a specialty because he believes that “orchestrating the care of several sick patients simultaneously” is one of the most fulfilling roles a physician can perform.  His professional interests include medical education for all practioner levels, high-fidelity medical simulation for resident education and assessment, EMS, and residency program administration/curricular design. With co-investigator Dr. Joseph LaMantia and geriatrician Dr. Jesse Roth, he was awarded the Geriatrics for Specialty Residents grant from the John A. Hartford Foundation and the American Geriatrics Society in 2003 for the project titled "A novel curriculum for teaching geriatric emergency medicine." In 2007, Dr. Cassara graduated from the ACEP/EMF Teaching Fellowship. In that year, he was also awarded the GSR-Dissemination Grant, which was used to create and organize the First Annual Symposium on Acute Geriatric Emergencies (in 2009), in collaboration with Yasuhara Okuda, MD and the faculty of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Cassara was awarded a Reynolds Foundation scholarship for the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Mini-Fellowship in Geriatrics for Non-Geriatricians which he completed in 2009.   Dr. Cassara has been selected as the department's Teaching Attending of the Year twice, in 2003 and in 2007, and was the recipient of the Health Care Chaplaincy’s Wholeness of Life Award in 2009. He is an active member on the New York Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians Education Committee, the SAEM Simulation Academy (Task Force Chair for the Faculty Development and Mentoring Committee), the CORD Simulation Task Force, and the SAEM Academy for Geriatric Emergency Medicine. His personal interests include playing the drums, cooking, and following all sports. He is married and has a daughter. 

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