Meet the Team
Co-Directors
Kirsten Austad, MD
Dr. Austad is a hospitalist at Boston Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. She serves as a Co-Director of CIIS. She completed a fellowship in global women’s health where she focused on improving delivery of reproductive health care in rural indigenous Maya communities of Guatemala. Her research seeks to use implementation science to promote health equity and improve patient experience in low-resource settings, including for patients with limited English proficiency.
Nick Bosch, MD
Dr. Bosch serves as Co-Director of CIIS. Dr. Bosch is an epidemiologist and health services researcher with methodological expertise in observational causal inference, econometrics, and comparative effectiveness research. His primary focus is on improving the delivery of routine care and outcomes in his patients with critical illness, especially those with sepsis. In addition to his research roles, he attends as a clinician in the Boston Medical Center Medical Intensive Care Unit and outpatient Pulmonary Clinic.
Research Director
Mari-Lynn Drainoni, PhD, MEd
Dr. Drainoni serves as the Research Director of CIIS. She is also a Research Professor in the Section of Infectious Diseases in the School of Medicine in the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and in the Department of Health Law, Policy & Management at the Boston University School of Public Health. Dr. Drainoni’s areas of expertise include the conduct of implementation research, qualitative research methods and mixed method studies with a focus on integrating research into practice. Her specific studies have focused on the content areas of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, as well as substance use, antibiotic prescribing and antibiotic stewardship, and integrating screening for social determinants of health into clinical practice. Dr. Drainoni has conducted numerous implementation studies to integrate research into practice, studies evaluating demonstration programs for at-risk populations, and mixed methods studies that include both surveys involving primary data collection and qualitative data collection and analysis.
Education Director
Kathryn Fantasia, MD, MSc
Dr. Fantasia is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and an endocrinologist in the Section of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Nutrition at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Fantasia’s research interests are in improving access to care and health outcomes for underserved patients with diabetes. Her research focuses on the identification of racial and ethnic disparities in diabetes care, particularly in the use of diabetes technologies, and interventions to increase technology adoption.
Assistant Director
Kayla Jones, MA
Kayla serves as the Assistant Director of CIIS. She is an applied medical anthropologist with a background in qualitative research methods. Her research experience has broadly focused on the patient experience and provider decision making. Kayla is passionate about the intersection of anthropology and implementation science, and the ways in which both fields can address health inequities in a safety-net setting.
Research Specialist
Faculty
Gabriela (Gaby) Cordova Ramos, MD
Dr. Cordova Ramos is a neonatologist at Boston Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Cordova Ramos’s research investigates racial/ethnic and linguistic disparities in neonatal-perinatal delivery of care. Her focus is on adapting evidence-based interventions to diverse populations in safety-net settings to increase their uptake, scale-up, and sustainability. Her project for the CIIS Fellowship examines the adaptation and implementation of standardized social determinants of health screening and referral in a safety-net NICU setting.
Shana Burrowes, PhD, CPH
Dr. Burrowes is an epidemiologist and Assistant Professor of Medicine in the section for Infectious Diseases at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Dr. Burrowes is a highly trained quantitative researcher and completed post-doctoral training at Boston University where she gained qualitative and mixed methods research skills. Her research covers a breadth of topics but is centered on addressing inequitable access to and receipt of healthcare in racial and ethnic minorities with a special focus on antibiotic use and clinical outcomes in the Latin American Caribbean Immigrant community.
Rebecca Rudel, DrPH, RD
Dr. Rudel is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the section for Infectious Diseases at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. She is a former clinical Registered Dietitian and is formally trained in program implementation and evaluation. Her research aims to improve access to clinical and community-based services for populations traditionally marginalized by the healthcare system.
Mei Elansary, MD, MPhil
Mei Elansary MD, MPhil is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Boston Medical Center, and a health services researcher. Dr. Elansary’s research investigates maternal mental health and child development. She has specific interests in parenting interventions for trauma-exposed families, with a focus on the prevention of child psychopathology. She aims to use implementation science to increase the availability of evidence-based parenting training interventions in the pediatric medical home and address barriers to access, engagement, and retention in parent training interventions among highly vulnerable dyads.
Katherine Rizzolo, MD
Dr. Katherine “Katie” Rizzolo is a clinician-investigator and instructor in the Department of Nephrology at Boston Medical Center. Her research interests center on advocacy for underserved communities disproportionately by kidney disease, especially Latinx and immigrant populations. Her current research aims to utilize implementation strategies to improve access to, and uptake in, patient-centered dialysis education for Latinx populations with kidney failure.
Research Fellows
2024-2026 Cohort
Cristina Gago, PhD, MPH
Dr. Cristina Gago is an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), where she studies public health approaches to address inequities in nutrition outcomes among parents and young children living in poverty. More specifically, her current program of research focuses on identifying and addressing drivers of under-enrollment in federal nutrition assistance programs, through novel intervention approaches. In doing this work, her long-term career goal is to support healthy growth and development in early childhood through the design and evaluation of family-based interventions for nutrition promotion. Prior to joining BUSPH in 2023, she trained as a postdoctoral researcher at NYU Langone’s Institute for Excellence in Health Equity, where her research focused on the evaluation of health behavior change interventions in the context of a large, Brooklyn-based federally qualified health center. Prior to that, she earned her PhD at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, where she examined key facilitators and barriers WIC and Head Start parents face in accessing healthful nutrition and health promotion resources for young children.
Divya Shankar, MD
Dr. Divya Shankar is an Assistant Professor in the Boston University Department of Pulmonary, Allergy, Sleep, and Critical Care Medicine and a health services researcher with an interest in studying and improving the quality and equity of care for patients with interstitial lung diseases (ILDs). Her current work leverages large, clinical databases to understand patterns of care for patients with ILDs and her long-term goal is to use implementation science methods to improve evidence-based care delivery in this population. Dr. Shankar completed her medical education at Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and then trained in Internal Medicine and Pulmonary and Critical Care at Boston Medical Center/Boston University.
2025-2027 Cohort
Dr. Abdallah is a geriatric hematologist and Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Section of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. She cares for patients with hematologic malignancies at Boston Medical Center and is board-certified in hematology, oncology, and geriatrics. Her research focuses on integrating geriatric assessment into the care of older adults with cancer, particularly those undergoing intensive therapies such as stem cell transplantation and cellular therapies (e.g., CAR T-cell therapy). Dr. Abdallah uses implementation science methods to improve access to geriatric oncology care in safety-net and resource-limited settings.
Bridget Poznanski, PhD is a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Her research applies implementation science methods to understand and improve the sustained delivery of evidence-based mental health interventions and services in widely accessed settings, including schools and pediatric healthcare systems, with particular attention to safety-net contexts, where need is greatest. Through partnership with community members and service systems, her work aims to advance equitable, culturally responsive, and contextually appropriate practices that enhance access to and engagement in effective care for children and families. Dr. Poznanski received her PhD in Clinical Science in Child and Adolescent Psychology, with a quantitative minor, from Florida International University. She completed her clinical internship and postdoctoral research fellowship with the Community and School Success Research Team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Dr. Lucy Schulson is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and an Attending Physician in the Section of General Internal Medicine at Boston Medical Center. She provides primary care in the Immigrant and Refugee Health Center. Her research focuses on patient safety and diagnostic equity, with particular attention to how health systems can better serve patients with non-English language proficiency. She aims to identify system-level contributors to diagnostic error and delays, and to design interventions or identify implementation strategies that promote more equitable, high-quality care. She was recently awarded a career development award from the American Heart Association to study disparities in heart failure diagnosis in ambulatory care. Dr. Schulson earned her MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she graduated with Honors in Research and was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. She holds an MPH in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and completed her Internal Medicine and Primary Care residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She subsequently completed a clinical research fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, with advanced training in epidemiology, biostatistics, and health disparities research.