Program Directors

Alyssa Peterkin, MD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine. She is an alumna and Director of the Grayken Fellowship in Addiction Medicine at Boston Medical Center. Her clinical roles include working as a hospitalist, rounding on the inpatient addiction consult service with fellows and working in Faster Paths, Boston Medical Center’s low barrier substance use disorder clinic.

Jessie Gaeta, MD has practiced Internal Medicine at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program since 2002 and served as Chief Medical Officer from 2015-2022. Dr. Gaeta has dedicated herself to advocacy for and with people living with substance use disorders, particularly when they are disconnected from traditional pathways to care. She is always learning more from people with lived experience about homelessness, opioid use disorder, and harm reduction. Over the past two decades, she has spearheaded numerous innovative initiatives to rethink how we approach care for individuals with substance use disorder and complex health conditions, particularly when these conditions are exacerbated by severe poverty and social stigma.

Emily Hurstak, MD is an Early Stage Investigator (ESI), primary care physician, addiction medicine specialist, and Assistant Professor at the Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine (BU-CAMED)/Boston Medical Center (BMC). At BMC, Dr. Hurstak provides primary medical care to patient populations that are at higher risk for poor health outcomes, teaches primary care and addiction medicine, and conducts clinical research around improving systems of care for patients with substance use disorders (SUD) and chronic pain syndromes. Before coming to BU-CAMED/BMC, Dr. Hurstak served as clinical teaching faculty at the University of California San Francisco, San Francisco General Hospital (UCSF/SFGH) and the Yale University School of Medicine and was the Assistant Director of the San Francisco Free Clinic. At UCSF/SFGH, Dr. Hurstak completed a primary care research fellowship in General Internal Medicine where she participated in research on opioid safety, patterns of unintentional overdose and substance use, and innovations to improve the treatment of chronic pain and substance use. She collaborated on several successful projects leading to multiple peer-reviewed publications and developed an interest in communication interventions to improve health outcomes. Since coming to BU-CAMED, Dr. Hurstak participates in both clinical care and research with a focus on health communication, health literacy, and improving care for patients with SUDs and chronic pain. Dr. Hurstak supervises medical students and addiction medicine fellows and has provided mentorship to multiple trainees in their independent scholarly work. She was recently named as an associate program director of the BMC Grayken Addiction Medicine Fellowship.

Dr. Hurstak is the medical director of the Office Based Addiction Treatment (OBAT) clinical program at BMC and of the Office Based Addiction Treatment Training and Technical Assistance (OBAT TTA) SUD Care Continuum Echo Program, a tele-mentoring program designed to deliver evidence-based addiction treatment education to multidisciplinary audiences. She is a co-investigator on several projects related to 1) communication and educational interventions to improve health outcomes for patients, 2) improving systems of care for patients with SUDs in primary care, and 3) evaluating integrative and non-pharmacologic approaches to treat chronic pain syndromes for patients with and without SUDs. She cares for adult medical patients in the primary care and OBAT clinics at BMC and has training in medical acupuncture.