Fariha Abbasi-Feinberg, MD, became the president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) board of directors on Monday, June 15, during the AASM annual membership meeting, which took place in Baltimore as part of the SLEEP 2026 annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
This is an excerpt from the remarks that she presented during the membership meeting.
Remarks by Dr. Fariha Abbasi-Feinberg
Good morning, everyone. My name is Fariha Abbasi-Feinberg, and I am incredibly honored to serve as the next president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. I have been involved with the Academy for 25 years. I have served on committees and task forces, chaired courses, and attended numerous meetings. And in all that time, the thing that strikes me the most is this: We are not one thing.
Some of you are like me: in practice every day fighting with insurance companies, explaining that bed rotting is not healthy. Some of you work in big healthcare systems or academic centers and do research, and thank goodness for that, because you are the ones asking the questions the rest of us need answers for. Some of you are the teachers of the next generation, and some of you do all of it. I have spent my career in various practice settings, and I know firsthand that the challenges facing a solo or small group are not the same as those facing my colleagues in large healthcare systems or academic centers.
I love that some of us are pulmonologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, or dentists. We are genuinely one of the most multidisciplinary specialties in all of medicine. This diversity makes our field so rich. I encourage all of you, no matter your training background or practice type, to get involved with the Academy.
So, as I step into this role, I want you to know a few things about what I believe. Access to sleep care is a health equity issue. Too many patients never get a diagnosis, never get treatment, never even get the conversation. This has to change, and we are the ones to change it.
Integration is essential. Sleep medicine does not succeed in isolation. It flourishes when we are connected with primary care, cardiology, psychiatry, pediatrics, and dentistry. We have to make it easier for the rest of medicine to work with us. We need new models of providing sleep care.
I am committed to focusing on practice success for sleep medicine physicians. We need tools, support, and resources that allow us all to do our best work. I am hopeful that the new home sleep apnea test codes will be meaningful and a step forward for our field. I want to focus on expediting new guidelines and providing clinically relevant updates to help our members and our patients.
Our workforce and pipeline matter. Our fellows are the future of this field, and investing in them, mentoring them, recruiting broadly, and making sleep medicine visible to the next generation is one of the most important things we can do.
Working along with industry and integrating new technologies thoughtfully gives us the opportunity to extend our reach and elevate our care, provided we do so with the scientific rigor and patient-centered values that define the Academy.
Academy courses and meetings remind me why the work matters. It made me fall in love with the science and practice of sleep medicine in the first place, and every meeting I fall in love all over again.
But the Academy has never just been a professional society to me. This community is deeply meaningful to me, not just professionally, but personally. And I suspect for many of you it is the same. Through the years, I have formed special bonds, which have been invaluable. For those of us in a practice setting, it can be very lonely. We often do not have other sleep colleagues in our same location.
This organization is our community. Not a bureaucracy, not just an accrediting body, but a living, breathing community of people who care deeply about something that many people take for granted every single night. It is an extraordinary privilege to help people sleep better. I do not take it lightly. I do not take this lightly.
Thank you for trusting me with this role. Thank you for building the community that has embraced me. And thank you, truly, for the work you do every single day.
