I grew up in Tampa, Florida and moved to Washington, DC for my undergraduate education at Georgetown University. After college, I spent a year working as an emergency department scribe and as a live-in nanny for a family with five children. My interest in pediatrics stemmed from that year as a nanny when I experienced the essential nature of pediatrics as a source of medical care, information, and comfort for not only a patient but for an entire family unit.
I graduated from Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University in 2016, and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to complete my general pediatric residency at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Through my experience as an emergency department scribe prior to medical school and during my pediatric training, I was fascinated by the tension between modern healthcare and technology; technology is essential to healthcare, but it is often viewed as a nuisance by clinicians. My interest in research grew naturally from this experience. With the goal of learning how to improve healthcare delivery systems, especially where healthcare intersects with technology, I started a General Academic Pediatrics research fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. My primary care research fellowship included experience and training as a pediatric primary care health services researcher, clinical informatician, and quality improvement specialist. I joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in the division of General Academic Pediatrics in 2022. I am so grateful to the mentors who have helped me realize my passions over time including Drs. Kristin Ray, Judy Chang, and Evelyn Reis, and those who have sponsored me throughout my career including Drs. Alejandro Hoberman, Debra Bogen, and Steven Reis. With the guidance and support of my mentorship team I have been able to develop a research program which has focused broadly on the equitable and appropriate use of technology-enabled care in pediatrics. An example of this is highlighted in this issue of Pediatric Research, where we examined factors associated with attendance at pediatric primary care telemedicine visits and found that pediatric primary care telemedicine appointments are most likely to be attended if they are scheduled the same day. We also found disparities in scheduling and attending telemedicine appointments, but signs of improvement in language equity over time.
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