Match Day is a national rite of passage for fourth-year medical school students moving on to residency programs. A complex algorithm matches the students’ top choice of residencies with the programs’ top choice of students.
On Friday, the Temple/St. Luke’s School of Medicine celebrated Match Day for the second year in a row in Bethlehem. Thirty-eight students matched to residency programs, including 13 programs at St. Luke’s.
“National Match Day continues to be a special and meaningful event for our fourth-year medical students,” said Shaden Eldakar-Hein, MD, senior associate dean and professor at the medical school. “I feel honored to be a part of each member of our 2025 class’s journey and am inspired by their compassion, curiosity and dedication to our field.”
The Temple/St. Luke’s School of Medicine in Bethlehem is the Lehigh Valley’s first and only four-year medical school, where the region’s best and brightest young minds explore their interests in education, service and medicine simultaneously. By cultivating home-grown medical talent, St. Luke’s is helping the region to secure its future health and well-being amid a worsening doctor shortage nationally.
Pittsburgh-area native Logan Hellinger worked as a patient transporter during a gap year before starting medical school at Temple/St. Luke’s in Bethlehem. Since the day he was able to watch an open-heart surgery during a hospital shadowing program in high school, he says he was “sold that I wanted to do medicine.”
“During my first year here, I had the opportunity to shadow a few emergency medicine residents. One of the first-year residents immediately asked what I wanted to learn, how she could teach me, and if I’d like to come see patients with her,” says Hellinger, whose family traveled across the state to be with him on Match Day. “She’s a fellow here now who I had the privilege of working with on my ICU rotation and has been a longitudinal mentor from the residency side.”
Hellinger matched to Emergency Medicine at St. Luke’s Anderson Campus.
His classmate, Sierra Camburn, had a similar experience at St. Luke’s, though hers started in high school. The Quakertown native once took part in a medical careers pathway program that allowed her to spend time at the Quakertown Campus several days a week. Additionally, as an undergrad at Penn State, she did a pre-med observership at the Bethlehem Campus. It was then that she fell in love with labor and delivery, and she now hopes to match into an obstetrics and gynecology residency.
“One of the perks of coming to a campus like this is that everyone has been a mentor,” Camburn said before rattling off a long list of names of those who have helped her along the way. “There has been no shortage of people here who want to teach us. I’ve discovered one of the perks of being at a community-based hospital is that during rotations, physicians get to know you and trust you and want to mentor you. It’s been a great experience for me. I’ve learned so much from everybody I’ve worked with.”
Camburn matched to OB/GYN at New York University, Long Island.
Photo caption: Logan Hellinger (left), from Allison Park, PA, and Taj Singh (right), of Breinigsville, PA, react to learning that they both matched into medical residencies with St. Luke’s University Health Network. Hellinger matched into the emergency medicine residency at Anderson Campus; Singh matched into the internal medicine residency at Bethlehem Campus.
Below are the residency programs to which St. Luke’s students matched:
Anesthesiology:
- Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
- Penn State Hershey Medical Center
- University of Rochester/Strong Memorial, NY
Child Neurology:
- Mayo Clinic, FL
Dermatology:
- St. Luke’s Hospital, Anderson
Emergency Medicine:
- Henry Ford Hospital, MI
- New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Hospital, NY
- Rush University Medical Center, IL
- St. Luke’s Hospital, Anderson
- University of Rochester/Strong Memorial, NY
Family Medicine:
- Brown University/Kent Hospital
- Inova Fairfax Hospital, VA
- St. Luke’s Hospital, Bethlehem
General Surgery:
- Stony Brook Teaching Hospital, NY
- St. Luke’s Hospital, Bethlehem
- Thomas Jefferson University, PA
Internal Medicine:
- George Washington University, D.C.
- Mayo Clinic, MN
- Montefiore Medical Center, NY
- Rutgers, RW Johnson Medical School
- St. Luke’s Hospital, Bethlehem
- Zucker SOM-Northwell NS/LIJ, NY
Obstetrics-Gynecology:
- NYU Grossman Long Island SOM, NY
- Penn State Hershey Medical Center, PA
- Stamford Hospital/Columbia, CT
- University of Rochester, Strong Memorial, NY
Otolaryngology:
- Geisinger Health System
Orthopedic Surgery:
- Prisma Health, University of South Carolina SOM
Pathology:
- Yale – New Haven Hospital, CT
Pediatrics:
- St. Luke’s Hospital, Anderson
- Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, NC
Psychiatry:
- St. Luke’s Hospital, Anderson
- St. Luke’s Hospital, Bethlehem
- Thomas Jefferson University, PA
About St. Luke’s
Founded in 1872, St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) is a fully integrated, regional, non-profit network of more than 20,000 employees providing services at 15 campuses and 350+ outpatient sites. With annual net revenue of $4 billion, the Network’s service area includes 11 counties in two states: Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Montgomery, Monroe, Schuylkill and Luzerne counties in Pennsylvania and Warren and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey. St. Luke’s hospitals operate the largest network of trauma centers in Pennsylvania, with the Bethlehem Campus being home to St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital.
Dedicated to advancing medical education, St. Luke’s is the preeminent teaching hospital in central-eastern Pennsylvania. In partnership with Temple University, the Network established the Lehigh Valley’s first and only four-year medical school campus. It also operates the nation’s oldest School of Nursing, established in 1884, and 52 fully accredited graduate medical educational programs with more than 500 residents and fellows. In 2022, St. Luke’s, a member of the Children’s Hospital Association, established the Lehigh Valley’s first and only free-standing facility dedicated entirely to kids.
SLUHN is the only Lehigh Valley-based health care system to earn Medicare’s five-star ratings (the highest) for quality, efficiency, and patient satisfaction. St. Luke’s is a Leapfrog Group and Healthgrades Top Hospital and a Newsweek World’s Best Hospital. The Network’s flagship University Hospital has earned the 100 Top Major Teaching Hospital designation from Fortune/PINC AI 10 years in a row, including in 2021 when it was identified as THE #1 TEACHING HOSPITAL IN THE COUNTRY. In 2021, St. Luke’s was also identified as one of the 15 Top Health Systems nationally. Utilizing the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) system for both inpatient and outpatient services, the Network is a multi-year recipient of the Most Wired award recognizing the breadth of SLUHN’s information technology applications such as telehealth, online scheduling and online pricing information.
Information provided to TVL by:
Sam Kennedy
