Pathways to medicine

Dr. Mónica Osbelia Ruiz is in her first year as an attending at Brown University as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Critical Care Medicine. She was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley along the South Texas-Mexico border, as a first generation Mexican-American. It is in her hometown, among her community, that she discovered her love for medicine and passion for addressing health disparities.

She earned a degree in Neurobiology from The University of Texas at Austin and then pursued a dual MD/MPH degree at The University of Texas at San Antonio School of Medicine (UTHSCSA-SOM). While in medical school she was accepted as a Kleberg Research Scholar, in which she led community-based interventions aimed at addressing health disparities among communities in the South Texas-Mexico border. She stayed at UTHSCSA-SOM for her pediatric residency and earned a Kleberg Research grant, which resulted in the successful establishment of novel community health clubs for immigrant families in the same community. While in pediatric residency, she discovered her interest in health disparities, passion for medically complex patients, and immersion in the extreme presentation of preventable disease, all merged in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Dr. Ruiz went on to complete pediatric critical care medicine fellowship at Stanford University in California.

As a critical care medicine fellow, she was introduced to studying health disparities via translation science research. Ultimately, Dr. Ruiz decided to study the association of stress biomarkers (hair cortisol concentrations) and adverse childhood experience (ACEs) in young children from marginalized communities. Furthermore, she led a health equity initiative in the PICU that addressed language barriers for families/patient with limited English proficiency and the development of an inpatient health equity dashboard, centered on language access (interpreter use). She was recently awarded an NIH Diversity Supplement to continue her work in ACEs and stress biomarkers. Now in her early career as faculty, she intends to continue her translational science research in childhood trauma/adversity and biomarkers and her health equity work in language access.