2021 LEAD Scholars

Ireen Ahmed, MD

Dr. Ahmed is an attending physician at Tufts Medical Center in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She obtained her B.A. at CUNY Brooklyn College in Anthropology, and her medical degree from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine. She completed her residency and fellowship at Tufts Medical Center as a part of the Triple Board Program. She is currently board certified in Pediatrics, Adult Psychiatry, and Child Adolescent Psychiatry. Her work focuses on integrated behavioral health in the pediatric setting as well as mental health access and treatment for minority populations, specifically the Asian American community. As a Bangladeshi American, mental health access and treatment in the South Asian American community is an important topic to Dr. Ahmed. Through the LEAD Scholar’s program, Dr. Ahmed hopes to gain tools to continue to address racial disparities in mental health care and create systemic change that supports structural diversity and equity.

Francisco Carrillo-Salinas, PhD

Dr. Carrillo-Salinas is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the department of Immunology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He received his Master in Neuroscience and PhD in Neuroscience from Universidad Autonoma of Madrid, Spain, where he studied the therapeutic efficacy of cannabinoid derivatives in experimental models of multiple sclerosis, and the role of gut microbiota in a viral model of multiple sclerosis. Following this, he joined the Alcaide lab at Tufts University to study the role of gut microbiota alterations in T cell activation and in the progression of heart failure. Currently, Dr. Carrillo-Salinas is a member of Marta Rodriguez-Garcia’s laboratory at Tufts University, where is focused on deciphering the role of microbiota-derived metabolites in neutrophil function in the female genital tract and in mucosal HIV acquisition. He was awarded with an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship, which contributed to the development of his project. In addition, he has been the recipient of the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP) Experimental Pathologist-in-Training (EPIT) Award in 2019 and 2021, ASIP GALL Trainee Scholar Award for Excellence in Cardiovascular Research in 2018 and 2020, among others.

Lee Joseph, MD, MS

Dr. Joseph is a cardiovascular physician at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. She grew up in India and completed her medical school at the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences. She completed residency and fellowship training at Cleveland Clinic and University of Iowa, then trained as a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Professor Michael Welsh, Howard Hughes Medical Institute/University of Iowa. During this time, she completed a master's degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Iowa. Her work is focused on understanding the mechanisms of cardiovascular diseases in women. She is particularly interested in the interactions between genetic and environmental factors in disease development, and in the use of evoked phenotypes as a tool for disease mechanism discovery. Dr. Joseph had received awards for best research at Cleveland Clinic and University of Iowa, American College of Cardiology PVD Council Award, American Heart Association PVD Fellow in Training Award and American College of Cardiology Henry I Russek Award. Recently, she was awarded the Telemachus and Irene Demoulas Family Chair for Women’s Health to set up a Women’s Heart Health Program as a joint effort between Winchester Hospital and Lahey Hospital and Medical Center.

Cristina Montalvo, MD

Dr. Montalvo is the Chief of Consultation-Liaison and Emergency Psychiatry at Tufts Medical Center and is an assistant professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and adjunct assistant professor at Boston University School of Medicine. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Theology at Boston College and a masters of Biological Science at University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She completed her medical school training at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and went on to do her adult psychiatry residency training and Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry fellowship at Boston University Medical Center. Her clinical research has primarily focused on quality improvement for patients with mental illness within the acute medical setting and substance use disorders.

Claudia Sotillo, MD

Dr. Sotillo immigrated to the US from Lima, Peru, as a child, spending her formative years in Lakeland, FL. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Biology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, going on to the Boston University School of Medicine, where she earned her MD. Prior to beginning her anesthesiology residency, she was selected as a year-long medical student anesthesiology research fellow for the FAER MSARF. Her project focused on using RNA-Seq for the study of Rheumatic Heart Disease in Rwandan young adults. She completed her anesthesiology training at the University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology, then returned to Boston for a fellowship in Anesthesia Critical Care Medicine at Brigham Women’s Hospital. She joined Tufts Medical Center’s Department of Anesthesiology Perioperative Medicine in September 2020 and primarily divides her time between the operating room and the cardiac ICUs. Most recently, she was selected as the new Interim Associate Program Director for the Tufts Medical Center anesthesiology residency and Course Director for the Anesthesia Critical Care Medicine (ACCM) conference series.

Roberto Viau-Colindres, MD

Born in Guatemala City, Dr. Viau-Colindres learned about the impact of antimicrobial resistance in the most vulnerable populations while doing rotations in the Guatemala Public Hospitals. He came to the United States in 2008 as an Internal Medicine Resident in New York City with the intention of ultimately becoming an Infectious Diseases Physician, completing his fellowship at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, under Dr. Robert Bonomo, a leading expert in antimicrobial resistance. He is currently focused on finding combination treatment for multi-drug resistant organisms. By taking a systematic approach to combination therapy, Roberto’s work will result in increased ability to extend antibiotic’s useful life and to make therapies available to persons and places where the latest patented drugs are not available or affordable.