What do you do now?

I am the Family Medicine Residency Director and Chief of Family Medicine at Natividad in Salinas, California. I am still practicing full spectrum family medicine, delivering babies, doing hospital work, have my own continuity practice. I also teach abortion care and get to do all the fun things in family medicine. I also run a residency program out at Natividad. 

What attracted you to Brown FM residency?

I was really drawn to being in a program that trains people for full spectrum Family Medicine care. It was amazing and I felt it was a place where people were really committed to the mission of caring for the community. After residency I then stayed on as a faculty member because I got to work with such amazing people I had a lot of opportunities come my way through being on the faculty at Brown. I got to do a master’s degrees in health professions education, which really launched my career as an educator. 

Do you still keep in touch with your co-residents?

I'm still very close with my classmates. Even though we are spread all over the country, we are all still very excited to get together and connect when we see each other. When you go through the intensity of medical training, you see people at their best and their worst and you love them for who they are. That fosters a really deep connection. 

What advice would you give to current residents?

What I tell my residents is that you can do this, believe in yourself. I think a lot of us come through training and question whether we are good enough or deserve to be there and there’s a lot of imposter syndrome. Just knowing that if you got to residency, you are meant to be there and everyone is there to support you and get you on your way. Try to do your best and take care of yourself but also take advantage of the incredible learning opportunities that you have before you because that is what is really unique during residency. 

Why did you enter medicine and specifically into family medicine?

At a certain point, I realized I wanted to have more of a social impact. I wanted to relate to people and public service was more important to me so I gradually made my way over to medicine and family medicine in particular really spoke to that. In Family Medicine there is a strong heap of public service and helping communities that really resonated with me. I also really liked to be able to take care of most of the things that would come to you within primary care and having that relationship be essential to their health. 

Who were your mentors in Residency?

Rabin Chandran was a strong mentor of mine. He was one of the people that I met at lunch on my interview day at Brown and pretty much convinced me to come there. He was a faculty member and then a colleague when I joined the faculty and now we have become good friends and is just a really lovely part of my life. Of course, I have to mention Jeff Borkan. He was critical to my success in academic medicine. He became the chair of the department when I was a chief resident, and he recruited me to the faculty and supported me to pursue the master's program. 

Alicia Monroe. She ran the faculty development fellowship I participated in as a junior faculty member and she was a really key role model for me. Julie Taylor, when I first joined the faculty I was working on her team and she was an incredible mentor to help me get started in academic medicine. She helped me get involved with multiple scholarly projects that she was working on. 

Sue Magee was a year ahead of me and chief resident. She encouraged me to run for chief resident and that was the first big leadership position that I had. It was a way to start thinking about myself in a leadership role and that led onto the residency leadership. Sue is a very dear friend of mine, she delivered my baby and we still spend the holidays together in Rhode Island every year. 

Overall I'm still very connected to Brown. I still see the faculty at conferences and we have lots of folks at Natividad that came through the Brown Residency Program or med school. I visit almost every time I am back east a couple times a year. It’s a community that stays very connected. 

I am living the dream, bringing idealistic medical school graduates in and try to help them maintain their idealism through the really important work during residency and then helping them figure out where is there place in the clinical family medicine world to continue to do that important work and serving the people who most need them.