Board Members & Officers

Robert Motley, MD, MS

President

Robert Motley, MD, MS is a native of Philadelphia and graduated from LaSalle University and Jefferson Medical College (now Sidney Kimmel Medical College). Bob remained at Jefferson for residency training in Family Medicine and also obtained a Certificate of Added Qualification in Geriatric Medicine. He practiced Family Medicine & Geriatrics for 19 years in Bucks and Montgomery Counties, PA prior to joining the residency faculty at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown, PA. There he also served as Medical Staff President and subsequently as Chair of the Department of Community Health. In 2018, Dr. Motley returned to Jefferson, where he was a practicing clinician and Vice Chair, Community Medicine until the summer of 2024. Now working part-time, Bob is enjoying having the flexibility to spend more time being enriched by his faith, family and friends.

Bob has been a member of the Catholic Medical Association (CMA) since medical school. He has mentored Catholic medical students in Philadelphia for twenty-plus years and was a conference planner and presenter for the CMA Student Boot Camp for more than 10 years. He and his wife Jeanne-Marie live in Montgomery County and have five adult children, four of whom are in the health professions. They have been blessed with 16 grandchildren.

Sarah Contrucci, DO

Vice President

Dr. Sarah Contrucci grew up in Kittanning, PA (outside of Pittsburgh) and graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Molecular Biology. She studied theology at the Angelicum in Rome for three semesters before medical school at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine. She moved to Philadelphia for residency in Diagnostic Radiology at Hahnemann University Hospital until its closure and then completed residency at Temple University Hospital and a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently works as a radiologist at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. She has been involved with the St. John Neumann Guild of the Catholic Medical Association since arriving in Philadelphia in 2017 and is also heavily involved with volunteering at her parish in several capacities.

N. Joseph Schrandt, MD

Treasurer

Dr. Schrandt was born and raised in eastern Iowa, graduated from University of Minnesota Medical School and completed neurology residency at the University of Iowa. After a year of epilepsy fellowship in Minneapolis, he practiced general adult neurology there for five years before moving to Wilmington, Delaware along with his wife, Dr. Mary McCrossan and their three children. Prior to his recent retirement, he practice neurology for several decades along with his two partners and two midlevel practitioners.

Dr. Schrandt joined the CMA and completed the certification course in Health Care Ethics from the National Catholic Bioethics Center in 2012. He has served as Delaware state director for the CMA since 2016.

Mary McCrossan, MD

Secretary

Mary McCrossan, M.D. is a family physician and a mother of three adult children, whom she raised with her husband Joseph Schrandt. MD. Dr McCrossan first became aware of the CMA more than 20 years after medical school, as she researched Catholic teaching while serving as a children’s weekend religious education instructor. This happy discovery led to spiritual and professional growth, including increased work in pro-life activity and acquiring expertise in fertility awareness-based methods for women’s health.

Dr. McCrossan has practiced in the St. Francis Wound Center in Wilmington, DE and also guides Family Medicine residents in the clinical office as a preceptor. She is finishing up her term as President of the Medical Executive Committee at St. Francis Hospital of Trinity Health.

Mary and husband Joe, who is fully retired, really enjoy traveling to Kansas City to visit their four grandchildren.

Lester Ruppersberger, DO

Past President

Lester Ruppersberger D.O., FACOOG (Dist.) is a retired NFP-only Board-Certified Ob/Gyn who spent 40 years in clinical practice. He served as President of the national Catholic Medical Association in 2016 after serving on the board for 13 years. He is currently Past President of the St. John Neumann Guild of Philadelphia after 6 years of service as President. Les has served on the faculty of his alma mater at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, has authored several articles, and a book called Wonderfully Made Babies. He is the medical director for three pregnancy resource centers in Philadelphia and has served on the CMA Boot Camp Educational Planning Committee for 12 years. Les and his wife, Betty, have both been inducted into the order of St. Gregory the Great. They have been married more than 55 years, have two sons Drew and Gregg, and 10 grandchildren. They reside in Langhorne, PA

Rev. Fr. Joseph Ryan, OSA

Guild Chaplain

Father Joseph Ryan has been an Augustinian priest for more than forty years and is particularly excited that one of his brother priests is now Pope Leo XIV. Fr. Ryan earned his doctorate in the History of Medicine and Immigration from American University in 1997. He has published on the History of Catholic physicians and the rise of scientific medicine. He is an Associate Teaching Professor in the History Department of Villanova University and has taught there for more than 25 years.

Fr. Ryan is a member of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher and the Knights of Columbus. He was the President of the Archdiocesan Historical Commission for the canonization of Servant of God Fr. William Atkinson, OSA. On weekends, Fr. Ryan celebrates mass at St. Matthew’s in Conshohocken where he has served for more than 25 years.

Carolyn Felix, MD

Board Member

Dr. Felix is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the past Joshua Kahan Endowed Chair in Pediatric Leukemia Research and a physician-scientist in the Division of Oncology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She graduated from the Boston University School of Medicine, completed a pediatric residency at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and then her fellowship in the Pediatric Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute. The bench-to-bedside environment of the NCI sparked her desire to understand the molecular basis for differences in clinical outcomes in pediatric patients with leukemia so as to develop better treatment. Since first establishing her lab at CHOP, she has focused her research on high-risk forms of leukemias in infants and young children and a type of leukemia that occurs as a chemotherapy complication.

Dr. Felix enjoys mentoring and education. She has held leadership and administrative roles at CHOP where she initiated a campus-wide multi-disciplinary leukemia special interest group, now the Normal and Malignant Hematopoiesis Research Affinity Group of the CHOP Research Institute. She is a Past President of the John Morgan Society, the oldest honorific biomedical society in the United States. She has been a medical journal peer reviewer, serving as a member of Study Sections of the NIH and several private foundations. Carolyn also volunteers on the Board of Jericho Homestead Inc., a foundation started by Fr. Daison Areepparamil with the mission to build and support the House of Mary and Joseph, a home for the homeless in India.

Tucker Brown

Board Member

Tucker Brown serves as the Director of Development for FACTS About Fertility, working to advance FACTS’ mission to equip medical professionals to provide the reproductive care patients deserve. He earned a B.S. from Penn State University, an M.D. from Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, and an M.A. in Philosophical Studies from Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary. During medical school, Tucker was an active member of the Catholic Medical Association (CMA) Student Section, where he served as board Secretary and President. Largely due to the community and witness of the CMA, Tucker recognized the need for more thorough education in reproductive health and physiology, and he trained in NaProTechnology at the Pope Paul VI Institute. He’s grateful to be bringing restorative approaches to reproductive care into the mainstream through FACTS—both for the sake of better care for patients and for a more fulfilling practice of medicine for clinicians. Tucker lives in Phoenixville, PA with his wife Margaret and their toddler daughter.

Joseph Mallon, MD

Resident representative

Dr. Mallon grew up in Macungie, PA. His father, an internal medicine specialist, was a hospitalist at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown. Joe graduated from Temple University where he was active in his Catholic faith. He received medical degree from Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He is currently a resident in Internal Medicine at Jefferson Health Abington.

Zoe Barinaga

Student CMA representative

Originally from Houston, Texas, Zoe is a second-year MD student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Prior to coming to Philadelphia, she received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Florida and an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. In addition to serving as Co-President with the Philadelphia Student Catholic Medical Association, Zoe helps lead the Winged Ox Forum with Collegium, a local biweekly bioethics and faith-in-medicine discussion group. She is currently exploring medical specialties while on her clinical rotations, and in her free time she enjoys learning languages, ice skating, and discussing moral philosophy.