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January Member Profile: Dr. Nicholas Pennings

January Member Profile: Dr. Nicholas Pennings

January 21, 2025

January Member Profile: Dr. Nicholas Pennings

By Kevin LaTorre 
Communications and Membership Manager

For January 2025, we’re thrilled to feature Dr. Nicholas Pennings for the NCAFP Member Spotlight!

Dr. Pennings works as a family physician at the Campbell University School of Medicine (CUSOM), where he is also the Family Medicine Chair and the faculty advisor for the CUSOM Family Medicine Interest Group.

We spotlight NCAFP members who make unique impacts on their patients and communities. If you or one of your colleagues is providing a unique service, contact us so we can consider spotlighting you or your colleague!

Dr. Pennings received the 2024 NCAFP Distinguished Physician Award for his committed patient care and teaching. 

On Dec. 7, 2024, Dr. Pennings received the award during a ceremony at the NCAFP’s Winter Family Physicians Weekend. The award is the Academy’s most prestigious honor, and Dr. Pennings earned it through his commitment to holistic patient care, clinical excellence, and mentoring medical students. NCAFP Immediate Past President Dr. Garett Franklin said, “While his clinical acumen alone could warrant this award, Dr. Pennings’s greatest achievements come from molding the next generation of physicians, particularly family physicians.”

As the CUSOM Family Medicine Chair and faculty advisory for the Family Medicine Interest Group, Dr. Pennings provides opportunities for medical students interested in Family Medicine to experience the specialty through CUSOM curriculum, educational events, and in-clinic shadowing. He even opens his own clinical workdays to the students and residents who want to receive his hands-on mentorship.

Dr. Pennings originally came to North Carolina to teach Family Medicine after first learning it through years of practice, he says.

He completed his undergraduate degree at Cornell University, his medical degree at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and then his Family Medicine residency at Parkview Hospital in Philadelphia, PA. From there, Dr. Pennings and his wife went to live in the town where they grew up, 60 miles west of New York City, NY. He practiced Family Medicine there until he felt it was time for a change: “I was practicing for 22 years before I went into teaching,” Dr. Pennings says. “After my kids had grown up, I decided that I really wanted to teach.” Thanks to a long-time connection with Dr. John Kauffman (the founding dean at CUSOM), Dr. Pennings ended up in Lillington, NC.

“When John became the dean, he invited me to be part of the department,” he says. “It was part-time for two months, and then it was full-time and I was running the health center. And then three years later, I became vice chair. Four years later, I became chair.” Based on the work he has done at Campbell, this growth makes sense: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and I worked hard to establish myself. When the opportunities came, I was very fortunate to be where I was but also to be prepared to step into these roles.”

When Dr. Pennings became Vice Chair of the department, he became more involved with the medical students. “What first excited me about coming to Campbell was the chance to work with students and share my experience as a clinician,” he says. “I could bring a lot of real-world, Family Medicine experience, which has helped me to introduce students to Family Medicine.”

Under his leadership, hundreds of CUSOM students have entered Family Medicine. “I’m very proud of how many students that we’ve matched into Family Medicine for the past few years,” Dr. Pennings says. “To be a part of that has really been just a wonderful experience.”

Testimonies from the Campbell medical students who nominated Dr. Pennings for his NCAFP award say that their experience has also been wonderful, thanks to his influence. “One can tell he genuinely cares about our well-being and wants to see us all succeed,” they wrote in a letter. “He has all the qualities of a great educator, sets a great example, and above all else deeply cares for his students and patients.”

Care for his patients led Dr. Pennings to take up and teach obesity medicine, in addition to Family Medicine.

In addition to family medicine, he is also board-certified in obesity medicine, and he first pursued this training because he saw first-hand how obesity worsened his patients’ health. “I saw my patients getting heavier and having a lot of complications from their obesity,” Dr. Penning says. “But when I started a program in my practice that helped them lose weight, I saw all these improvements in their health. To me, that was the perfect way to help people get healthier.”

Seeing these real benefits to his patients, Dr. Pennings wanted to teach obesity medicine to medical students so their future patients would receive the same benefits. “No medical schools for Family Medicine had any obesity education as part of their curriculum,” he says. “It just wasn’t taught, even though obesity is the most common thing we see now.”

But Dr. Kauffman gave him the chance to teach obesity medicine at CUSOM, Dr. Pennings says: “That was one of the things that inspired me to come to Campbell. I trained to become board certified in obesity medicine before I started teaching it, and then we started incorporating that training into the curriculum. It has resonated well with the medical students.”

Dr. Pennings also expanded this obesity-medicine training beyond CUSOM through Think Healthy, the coaching program he founded and leads. Think Healthy trains health care professionals to coach their patients on losing weight and creating healthier mindsets, in addition to healthier outcomes. Its work, combined with his leadership at CUSOM, is what Dr. Pennings most values as a family physician and teacher: “My next real mission is to help family physicians integrate obesity medicine into their own practices,” he says. “It’s not easy to do, because it takes time. It’s going to be a process to make this skill more accessible to family physicians and students.”

We’d like to thank Dr. Pennings for his service to his patients and to his students.

If you’re providing unique service to your practice and community, please contact us at kevin@ncafp.com and let us know!