Dr. Byron Joyner graduated from Princeton University and received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. He completed his residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and then performed a research fellowship at the Boston Children’s Hospital. His two-year fellowship in pediatric in reconstructive urology was at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. He has been on the faculty at the Seattle Children’s Hospital since 2001 following a four-year commitment in the US Army, where he was a lieutenant colonel and chief of Pediatric Urology at Madigan Army Medical Center. In 2009, he received a Master in Public Administration degree, which he felt organized many of his principles of executive leadership.

Dr. Joyner's passion is learning about and designing better ways to improve graduate medical education (GME). As the program director for the Department of Urology for 12 years, he was responsible for the core curriculum and competency-based training of the urology residents at the University of Washington (UW). In 2014, he became the vice dean for Graduate Medical Education and the designated institutional official. In this role, he is responsible for the educational learning environment for more than 1,520 residents and fellows in 120 different ACGME-accredited programs. Recently, the GME Office has also acquired oversight for the nearly 120 non-accredited fellowship programs. In addition to these duties, Dr. Joyner is charged with the operations and continued accreditation of all these programs, as well as building GME and securing resources for the residents and fellows in the five-state Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho region.

His training in the UW Teaching Scholars program has allowed him to create new approaches to teaching residents and fellows about interpersonal and communication skills and professionalism. In fact, his efforts have been rewarded with the 2005 Julian S. Ansell Teaching Award. Besides the many scientific articles, he has published, he has written some seminal articles for urology in the field of GME and continues to champion better ways to improve doctors and doctoring. He was honored with the coveted ACGME Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award in 2011. He participated in and assisted in the publication of the 2011 Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation Atlanta Conference. In January 2014, he was named one of the top 10 Medical Educators in the US by Black Health Magazine. Dr. Joyner has been a member of the ACGME’s Review Committee for Urology for six years, during which he served a two-year term as vice chair.

In 2017, he received the Diversity Mentorship Award from the UW School of Medicine for working with faculty members, residents, and fellows of minority backgrounds and disadvantaged or disenfranchised medical students. In 2018, he completed a one-year stint as president of the Society of Academic Urologists, a national association of urology program directors and a community for which he has been a curriculum designer for the last 15 years. In December 2020, he was honored by the Harvard Medical School with the Mass General Brigham’s 2020 Alumna Alumnus Award for his national work in education. The same year, he was inducted into the prestigious American Association of Genitourinary Surgeons, an elite Society of the top 100 academic Urologists in the US.