Bernadette A. Riley of Bayville has spent the better part of two decades building credentials the way serious physicians do: one residency, one fellowship, one hard-won board certification at a time. On March 28, that work earned her a new title. Riley was elected Assistant Secretary of the Medical Society of the State of New York, the state’s principal physician organization, founded in 1807.
The position places her inside one of American medicine’s oldest institutional structures. MSSNY predates the Civil War, predates the American Medical Association, and predates most of the professional frameworks that govern how physicians practice today. Getting elected to any office in that body means something. It is not a ceremonial nod.
Riley is currently Director of the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Hypermobility Treatment Center at New York Institute of Technology, where she also serves as professor of family medicine at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine. EDS is a connective tissue disorder that has historically been underdiagnosed, and running a dedicated treatment center for it requires both clinical precision and institutional patience. Riley has both.
Her training path was not a straight line, which makes her resume more interesting than most. She started postgraduate work as an ENT and facial plastic surgery intern at Union Hospital in New Jersey after earning her Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine from New York College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2005. She completed two years of residency in that specialty before switching course. She finished a Family Medicine and Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment residency at Long Beach Medical Center in 2010, where she served as Chief Resident and was named Family Medicine Resident of the Year. Changing specialties mid-training is not common. Finishing at the top of your class after doing it is less common still.
She holds board certifications in Family Medicine from both the American Osteopathic Board of Family Physicians and the American Board of Family Medicine, and in Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine from AOBFP as well. She earned a Master of Science in Clinical Nutrition with Distinction from NYIT in 2023, adding a third graduate credential to a file that was already crowded.
The advocacy record matches the clinical one. Riley served as President of the New York State Osteopathic Medical Society from 2022 to 2024. She is Vice President of the Nassau County Medical Society, a member of the Nassau Academy of Medicine Board of Trustees, and chairs NAM’s Education Committee. She sits on MSSNY’s Women Physicians Committee and serves as faculty for the Women Physician Leadership Academy. She is a delegate for both MSSNY and the American Osteopathic Association. She completed the AOA’s Training in Policy Studies Fellowship in 2010 and graduated from the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine’s Osteopathic Health Policy Fellowship in 2020.
The education work may be her most durable contribution. Riley wrote the curriculum for NYIT’s EDS fourth-year elective, a congressional health policy fourth-year elective, and a two-year Congressional Health Policy Fellowship designed to prepare physicians to engage with health care policy at the local, state, and national level. Curriculum development of that scope does not happen by accident. It requires someone who understands both the clinical and political dimensions of medicine, and believes that physicians should be fluent in both.
She holds a fellowship from the Institute of Leadership in Medicine and completed ACOFP’s Physician Leadership Institute. She earned an academic qualification in international medicine and public health from the Institute for International Medicine and serves on the national faculty of the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners.
Riley graduated from Fordham University in 2001, earned her DO in 2005, and has been accumulating responsibilities and credentials in the years since without any visible pause. She lives in Bayville, where her interests outside medicine include reading, writing, and art.
The Medical Society of the State of New York has been the central voice of New York physicians for more than two centuries. Adding someone with Riley’s depth of training, policy experience, and institutional involvement to its leadership makes a straightforward kind of sense.