Profiling AFP’s 2026 Resident and Student Representatives

To help American Family Physician (AFP) meet the learning needs of future family physicians, a resident and a student serve one-year terms on the editorial board. This year’s representatives are Komal Gangar, MD, MBBS, a 2026 graduate of the UAMS Little Rock Family Medicine Residency Program; and Sunitha Konatham, MD, MPH, a 2026 graduate of Texas A&M University Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine. Among other duties, they have created content for AFP’s social media channels and helped organize and select the winners of our annual Photo Contest.

Komal is a first-generation physician from India who was attracted to family medicine by the clinical variety and the long-term connections with patients that she first experienced with her own family doctor. The editor of her medical school’s journal and chair of the UAMS Graduate Medical Education committee, she utilized LinkedIn and Instagram to build an international community of thousands of medical trainees. Describing AFP as “my comfort blanket,” Komal views the resident representative position as a natural extension of prior activities promoting the journal to friends and colleagues. Her goals include improving her skills reviewing manuscripts (“reading articles from an editor’s lens”) and debunking medical misinformation.

Sunitha was drawn to family medicine by “the breadth of the field and the emphasis on continuity, prevention, and advocacy.” Her interests in medical writing and editing and the student representative position “grew out of a desire to communicate complex medical information clearly and meaningfully.” As social media coordinator and editor-in-chief of Synapse, her medical school’s humanities magazine, Sunitha enjoyed “refining language, shaping narratives, and ensuring that ideas are both accurate and accessible.” This year, she aims to enhance her skills in critical appraisal of medical literature and clinical knowledge translation.

Both of our representatives enjoy pursuing outside interests. For Komal, these include dancing, basketball, and painting; for Sunitha, creative writing and music (singing, songwriting, and playing piano and guitar). We are pleased to continue working with them as they begin the next phases of their careers in family medicine.