My parents immigrated from Europe in 1952 and I grew up in a working class neighborhood of Lowell Massachusetts, attending a public high school. I did my undergraduate training at Bowdoin College and my medical school training at Harvard. I followed this with a residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Rochester. My first job was at the Indian Health Service Hospital in Zuni, New Mexico. Since 1984, I have been a primary care physician working for the Mass General Hospital Revere Health Center as a clinician, an administrator, and a clinician/educator for Harvard Medical School. I have dedicated my career to taking care of the underserved. My clinical and teaching interests are primary care administration, cross cultural medicine, and disparities in healthcare. Throughout my career, I have maintained an active clinical practice and the age span of my practice is from birth through adolescence and adulthood, and into the geriatric years. Currently my youngest patient is 2 days old and my oldest patient is 106 years old. Our health center takes care of multiple very diverse patient populations. Our most common patient ethnic origins are Italian, Cambodian, Latino and Hispanic, and Moroccan patients. We deliver care and multiple languages and across multiple religions and world beliefs. For example, in order to improve our disparities in diabetes health outcomes, we developed a bicultural, bilingual Cambodian diabetes program to help patients understand their illness through their own culture and manage their disease through diet, exercise and medications. We strongly believe that patients health outcomes are all too often determined by their ZIP Code and their social determinants of health such as housing, food insecurity, and the built environment of their neighborhoods. Our daily work is dedicated to the prevention of cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and accidental death and injury, including the devastation of the opiate epidemic.
On the lighter side, I am happily married with 2 wonderful adult sons, and my hobbies are mountain biking, sailing, skiing and traveling. I very much look forward to wonderful discussions with all the participants of CWA!