A family medicine career can lead you anywhere, says AAFP past president
April 29, 2026, David Mitchell — AAFP Past President Tochi Iroku-Malize, MD, MPH, MBA, FAAFP, never attended the Academy’s annual summer conference as a medical student, but she’s been doing her best for more than two decades to make sure other learners don’t miss the opportunity that she wishes she’d had.
Iroku-Malize was a chief resident at the Southside Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program in Bay Shore, New York, when she stumbled upon something unexpected.
“I was trying to pull some old information when I opened a box that had a big, heavy cardboard tri-fold with pictures on it,” said Iroku-Malize, who later served the program as associate program director and program director. “I went to the assistant program director and said, ‘What is this?’ He said, ‘Oh, National Conference. This is what we used to do to recruit students back in the day.’ I thought, ‘We have to do it again.’ We have been attending the conference ever since. I bring all of my residency programs, now six in number, and we always have a booth there.”
Family medicine opens doors to diverse career paths
FUTURE (formerly National Conference) draws hundreds of family medicine residency programs—and more than 1,000 medical students eager to meet them—to Kansas City, Missouri, every summer. In addition to a massive Expo Hall, the event offers educational sessions, hands-on clinical workshops, and student and resident congresses.
Iroku-Malize, an international medical graduate, has presented sessions on global health and advocacy topics at the conference. When FUTURE returns to Kansas City July 30-Aug. 1, she has something much broader in mind.
“My FUTURE session is going to walk learners through the whole arc of a family medicine career,” said Iroku-Malize, who has been the family medicine chair at Northwell Health and the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell since 2011. “This specialty will take them anywhere they want to go, whether it's globally, academically, clinically, leadership, advocacy, research, innovation, anything.”
Who better to tell the story of where family medicine can take you than Iroku-Malize, senior vice president of family medicine at Northwell Health, which serves 3 million people at more than 1,000 locations in New York and Connecticut?
From global health to leadership: A family medicine journey
Iroku-Malize knew early on that she wanted to be a physician. Her father was a surgeon, her mother a nurse practitioner. She was born in Brooklyn and lived in New York and New Jersey until her father moved the family to Nigeria to provide free care to a village.
Iroku-Malize attended the University of Nigeria College of Medicine and did an internship in Trinidad and Tobago. Being exposed to multiple health care systems fueled an interest in global health and family medicine.
“I thought, ‘I need to be able to see anybody, anytime, anywhere, regardless of what country I’m in or what resources are available,’” she said. “The one specialty that could prepare me for that was family medicine.”
Teaching support for IMGs and veterans at FMX
Iroku-Malize will present a session during the Family Medicine Experience (FMX), Oct. 20-24 in Nashville, Tennessee, on the barriers international medical school graduates (IMGs) face and how programs could better support IMGs.
“The IMG journey is one that many people don’t fully appreciate unless they’ve lived it,” she said. “We’re trying to remove that bias. Foreign-born IMGs are far from their support systems while doing one of the hardest things that they'll ever do, which is residency. That diversity of experience that an IMG brings—different health systems, different disease burdens, different cultural competencies—is an enormous asset to health care in the United States. IMGs make up a significant proportion of the family medicine workforce, so I want to make sure their stories are told and celebrated.”
Iroku-Malize, whose brother is a veteran, also will present an FMX session on improving care for veterans, service members and their families, and understanding their unique needs.
“Family physicians are often the first point of contact for veterans who are reentering civilian life,” she said, “and yet most of us receive little or no formal training in military culture.”
Iroku-Malize received a Hearst Foundation grant in 2024 to create a pilot training program that certifies Veteran Ready physicians.
“We're sharing that information everywhere so others can take it, run with it and do the same,” she said.
Continuing to lead nationally
Iroku-Malize’s six-year tenure on the AAFP Board of Directors ended in 2024, but she maintains numerous leadership positions, including serving in the AAFP’s AMA delegation. She is serving, again, on the board of the Association of Departments of Family Medicine as well as the board of the National Quality Forum. Locally, she serves on the boards of the EAC Network, a social service agency, and the Long Island Chapter of the American Red Cross.
“Family docs don't retire,” said Iroku-Malize, who no longer has a patient panel but continues to care for patients at a free clinic, and a clinic in a shelter for women and children. “We just reinvent ourselves.”
Doing it all requires intentional time management, a color-coded calendar and strong teams, she said. It helps that her roles reinforce each other.
“My research informs my teaching,” said Iroku-Malize, who is a professor at the Zucker School of Medicine and at the Institute of Health Systems Science at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. “My advocacy informs my clinical leadership. My national committee work feeds back into what I do locally. So, it’s not balancing separate things. It’s about running one career through various dimensions. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at saying no to things that don’t align with my vision. I genuinely love all of it, and that’s what's sustained me. If I ever get to a point where certain things don’t fit anymore, it’s OK to pull back. That’s part of navigating your career.”
Shaping the next generation of family doctors
Iroku-Malize also devotes time to mentoring through Columbia’s Health Policy and Management Mentorship Program and the Medical Society of the State of New York’s Women Physicians Leadership Academy.
“I want to make sure that I use the platform I built to keep opening doors for family medicine as a specialty and for other physicians,” she said. “As we do that, we help the patients in our community. So, my titles change, but the mission doesn’t.”
One of her long-time mentees is current AAFP President Sarah Nosal, MD, FAAFP, a fellow member of the New York AFP.
“It brings such joy to my heart,” Iroku-Malize said. “You see something in someone, and you know they are going to be fantastic. Now she’s mentoring others and pulling up the people coming behind her, so it just continues. And that's an awesome thing. I may have inspired her early in her career, but I am inspired by her now. In family medicine there's no ceiling on what you can do. People should find their mentors, build their community and never stop learning.”