Cohort 11 RAM Scholars (2022-24)

Brittany Dennis, MBBS, PhD
Addiction Medicine
British Columbia Centre on Substance Use

Dr. Brittany Dennis is an Addiction Medicine Fellow at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use. She is also supported by the Clinician Investigator Program at McMaster University. She will complete a data linkage investigation using Canadian provincial health administrative data to establish patterns of health care utilization, hospitalizations, and death for Hepatitis C positive patients with OUD. She intends to determine the distinct impact of Hepatitis C on clinical trajectory and adherence to opioid agonist therapy, estimating trends of hepatic decompensation, critical illness, hospitalization, and death among a cohort of hepatitis C positive patients receiving pharmacotherapy for OUD.

Connie Hsaio, MD, MS
Addiction Psychiatry
Yale School of Medicine

Dr. Connie Hsaio is an Addiction Psychiatry Fellow at Yale. She has a longstanding interest in addressing health disparities and hopes to develop the research skills to deliver systems-level interventions to improve health outcomes in underserved/under-resourced communities. She completed her training in combined internal medicine and psychiatry and is interested in issues of addiction at the intersection of behavioral health and primary care. Her RAMS project will evaluate interventions to improve sleep quality, including diagnosis and treatment of sleep-disordered breathing in patients receiving methadone or buprenorphine with co-occurring sleep disturbance at an opioid treatment program.

Samara Jinks-Chang, MD, MS, MPH
Addiction Medicine
Johns Hopkins University

Dr. Samara Jinks-Chang is an Adolescent Medicine and Addiction Medicine Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in leveraging pediatricians’ unique ability to offer intergenerational family services as a means to reduce exposure to household substance use. Her RAMS research project aims to understand caregiver acceptance of pediatricians screening for household substance use, as well as to measure the prevalence of substance use in families of pediatric patients in an urban hospital setting.

Eric Kutscher, MD
Addiction Medicine
NYU Langone Health

Dr. Eric Kutscher is an Addiction Medicine Fellow at NYU Langone Health/Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City. He has a passion for harm reduction, sexual health, and patient centered primary care, particularly for marginalized and underserved communities. He is currently studying longitudinal outcomes for individuals involved in the criminal justice system treated with buprenorphine versus methadone, particularly investigating overdose mortality, HIV, and Hepatitis C.

Gabriela Reed, MD
Addiction Medicine
Boston Medical Center

Dr. Gabriela Reed is currently an Addiction Medicine Fellow at Boston Medical Center. She completed internal medicine residency in a primary care track at the University of California, San Francisco. Clinically, she is passionate about integrating addiction care into primary care settings. Her research focus is on racial and ethnic inequalities in substance use disorders, with a particular interest in Spanish-speaking and Latinx communities. For her RAMS research project, she will analyze racial and ethnic differences in opioid overdose risk behaviors among people with prior opioid overdose, to inform future overdose prevention interventions.

Claire Simon, MD
Addiction Medicine
University of Washington

Dr. Claire Simon is a family physician and Addiction Medicine Fellow at University of Washington. She is interested in integrating addiction medicine into primary care settings as well as improving care for people with substance use disorders who are pregnant or parenting. Her RAMS project will describe treatment initiation and engagement among primary care patients with substance use disorder symptoms in order to understand gaps in treatment and inform design of interventions to address these treatment gaps.

Cohort 11 Scholar and Mentor Faceboard