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Celebrating Latino LEADERS

The DoM’s Latino LEADERS come from diverse backgrounds, but they all share a passion for serving communities and transforming patient care.

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we celebrate five Latino physicians at different points in their careers whose work and scholarship are shining examples of our values.

Ruth Miranda, MD

“I wondered, ‘Why don’t doctors speak Spanish?’” she said. That’s when she decided that she would become a Spanish-speaking doctor herself.

“I thought, ‘I did it for my mom. I want to be able to do it for my community as well,’” she recalled. Though the path to get there was initially unclear — neither of her parents attended college — her high school teachers helped her get into UCLA. Organizations such as the Flying Samaritans led her to mentors like Margarita Loeza, MD and Efrain Talamantes, MD, who gave her the guidance she needed to get into medical school. She was accepted into the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM) PRIME-LA program, through which she earned a master’s in public health alongside her medical degree. She believed the MPH would be highly valuable to her work as a clinician.

“I wanted to better understand our health system and public health in general, and to also be able to use that knowledge to help me take better care of my patients and community as well,” Dr. Miranda said. She graduated from DGSOM in 2021 and completed her training in primary care at UCLA-Olive View earlier this year.

Dr. Miranda has found that primary care puts her in the perfect position to lift up her Latino community. She wants to build long-lasting physician-patient relationships that are founded on trust, which is much easier to gain when both speak the same language. During her training at Olive View — where nearly all of her patients were Hispanic Spanish speakers — she witnessed the impact of clear communication firsthand.

“They felt much more comfortable sharing things. They would say, ‘I’ve never been able to say these things to a doctor,’” she recalled. “I don’t think that I’m any better than any other doctor — it’s just that it’s so helpful to have that cultural understanding with them and to be able to speak the same language and explain things to them.”  

Reflecting on her experience, Dr. Miranda believes that mentorship and visibility are the keys to bringing more Latinos and Latinas into medicine. She works with medical students who are rotating through her clinic at Torrance to show them how much primary care has to offer and to give them someone they can reach out to in the future if they have questions.

“I want to be able to be one of those doctors that were there for me when I was in their position,” Dr. Miranda said. She also works with the primary care residency group to recruit trainees, focusing specifically on bringing in more first-gen students from underserved backgrounds.

“The more of us mentors there are, the more people we can mentor and reach, and the more people will hopefully get inspired and want to be in our position and do the same,” she said.

In the same vein, Dr. Miranda wants Latino and Latina medical students and trainees to be fearless when it comes to finding mentors. It can be difficult to seek out mentees as a practicing physician, so those who are just starting their careers would benefit from making the first move when they find someone whose path they hope to walk.

“We want to do this. We want to get you to this point and support you. So just send that email,” Dr. Miranda said. “It’s okay to have help. We want to help you. You don’t have to do it alone.”

Benjamin Meza, MD

Dr. Meza’s interest in quantifying the link between social connections and health behaviors began when he was an undergraduate studying anthropology, political science and economics as an interdisciplinary major. While he learned a lot from conversations with people, “it was hard to make policy recommendations without quantitative evidence,” he said.

A strategy came in the form of what’s known as social network analysis, which he happened to take a class on while he was working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during medical school. “It was a way of quantifying a lot of the qualitative ideas that I had encountered previously — how people relate to each other, how they influence one another, how do they form relationships in the first place?” Dr. Meza said.

Research is but one of Dr. Meza’s many endeavors at UCLA. He sees patients and serves as a preceptor in the L.A. County safety net system at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. His work there is driven by his belief that everyone deserves top-tier care, no matter where they are on the socioeconomic ladder.

“I would like to try to provide the best quality health care to those people who may not otherwise receive it,” he said. “And there’s probably hubris in this, but I also believe there are right ways and wrong ways to serve the underserved. I have a particular perspective on how one does that with humility and intention, and I want to convey that to trainees.”

On top of that, Dr. Meza is also an asylum medical evaluator, meaning he conducts forensic medical and psychiatric evaluations of individuals and families seeking asylum in the United States, documenting evidence of torture and abuse for asylum legal proceedings. This difficult work is conducted through the student-run, faculty-supervised Los Angeles Human Rights Initiative at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center and the DGSOM.

Dr. Meza is also passionate about helping minoritized youth, including those from Latinx communities, enter the medical field. He has worked on pipeline projects in the past and is currently a mentor to what he describes as an “incredibly talented and thoughtful” medical student. He’s also trying to improve outreach to the heavily Latino community in the area around Olive View-UCLA.

“At this stage in my training, I’ve been in school for so long that it felt like a certain responsibility to try to help other people who are in the process,” he said.

While giving out advice isn’t his style — he says advice is often far too generic in a world where every individual has a unique history and journey — Dr. Meza does believe in seeking out mentorship at every point in one’s career.

“There’s a lot of power in mentorship, and it exists,” he said. “I know that I’ve felt like I was on my own at a lot of points, but there are tons of different types of mentors out there, and you should have them throughout your life.”

Hugo Torres, MD

Dr. Torres credits his parents and his Catholic upbringing with instilling his passion for education and service to those in need. He honed his desire to practice medicine through undergraduate volunteer experiences in Mexico and South Central L.A., and during medical school and graduate school for a masters in public health realized that while he wanted to treat individual patients, he also wanted to figure out how to treat the greater system that contributes to their illness.

“I realized that there are a lot of upstream factors that determine a patient’s health outcome and whether patients are likely to suffer from a health condition,” he explained. Over time, his interest began to center on diabetes, partly because of its prevalence in the Latino community.

“I felt like I could really make a difference, especially because I’m a fluent Spanish speaker and have family members with diabetes who are trying to navigate the health system,” Dr. Torres said. His personal experience is reinforced by work treating patients in regions of Latin America from which many U.S. immigrants originate and at a diverse safety net hospital in Massachusetts, where he trained during residency. He even learned Portuguese to better serve the many Brazilian patients he encountered there.

In keeping with his passion for education, social justice and patient care, Dr. Torres is currently pursuing a PhD in health policy and management through the STAR program. His dissertation is focused on how practice variation in the use of diabetes drugs like GLP-1 receptor agonists affects disparities in diabetes outcomes. He’ll present some of the insights he has collected so far on Oct. 9 at Research Day. That includes data that suggests low-income patients on Medicare or private insurance are more likely to skip medications due to cost than those on Medicaid, as their co-pays take up a bigger chunk of their disposable income.

“Theoretically, private insurance is supposed to be better than Medicaid,” Dr. Torres said. “In lots of cases, it’s actually not — Medicaid provides better financial protection.”

After he wraps up his PhD, Dr. Torres hopes to get involved in career pipeline projects like those he was involved with in medical school. As president of his school’s Latino Medical Student Association, he led outreach initiatives to Latino and Latina students at local universities and community colleges to encourage them to pursue careers in health care. He believes efforts to fix the shortage in Latinx physicians would be even more effective if they started earlier.

“I think we need to focus on and get creative with even middle and high school education,” Dr. Torres said.

Academic medicine is even less representative of the population than the broader field, he added, which is why he views mentorship in academia as especially crucial for minoritized students. Dr. Torres feels grateful that he will have the chance to mentor early-career physicians and junior investigators from Latino backgrounds when he takes on an academic role and looks forward to being both inspirational to and inspired by his students.

“I think it will be really special,” he said.

Dr. Torres encourages Latino and Latina clinicians and scientists who are just starting out to be confident and not to underestimate their potential.

“A big problem that I and I think a lot of folks have experienced is imposter syndrome, and that can impede people from really reaching what they could achieve,” he said. “Work hard and earn everything, but don’t assume that you don’t know things that other people know or that you’re not good enough.”

Alejandra Casillas, MD

Dr. Casillas’ parents are immigrants from Mexico whose education stopped at sixth grade. They worked in service jobs all their lives; her mother was a cafeteria employee, and her father still waits tables to this day. She noticed at a young age that her family suffered from a lot of healthcare hardships but initially chalked it up to a difficult life.

“Now we can look back and see that a lot of those health care issues were very much driven by the social drivers of health,” Dr. Casillas said. “Back then, I didn’t know what that was — I just thought, wow, life has been hard on the bodies of my family and community, and I really want to make that easier for them.” 

Her service-oriented nature and aptitude for science and math led her into medicine and health communications disparities research, an interest that began in high school when she had the opportunity to conduct lab research at Harbor-UCLA. She returned to Los Angeles after her studies and clinical training as a UCLA Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, where she completed a fellowship in health services, conducted community-partnered research projects and earned a master’s degree.

After working on projects to address immigrant health disparities in Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland, Dr. Casillas came back to the DoM, this time as a as a clinician researcher studying how digital health communications and electronic health records impact health for patients who don’t speak English or have low literacy.  Her work with the L.A. County DHS has resulted in a health technology navigator program to make digital health more accessible for patients within the county healthcare system. She’s now co-leading multi-institution initiatives like the NIH program AIM AHEAD, and the Digital Health Equity Collaborative (partnered with colleagues at UCSF and Harvard) that bring together researchers, health care leaders and community organizations to figure out how to leverage new technologies like AI and machine learning

Dr. Casillas’ own experience navigating the medical profession’s many twists and turns as a first-generation college student led her to create the popular First-Gen program at UCLA DGSOM, which for the past seven years has been helping first-gen college graduates who are now medical students find mentorship and connect with each other. Its success inspired similar programs at other professional schools on campus, and even informed toolkits developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges for first-gen students and their mentors. Dr. Casillas still serves as faculty co-advisor for the organization alongside Veronica Ramirez, MD.

“All the time, we’re getting emails from medical schools across the country that want to establish a first-gen program, because we were one of the first ones to do it,” Dr. Casillas said. “I think we’re one of the ones that does it best because we’re in Los Angeles and recruit a highly diverse population.”

Dr. Casillas is also passionate about strengthening the pipeline for Latinx physicians. She and four other participants in the 2024 National Hispanic Health Foundation Leadership Fellowship are developing medical workforce diversity policies that will be shared with state representatives who can eventually introduce them into legislation. Her policy project specifically focuses on giving students from Latino backgrounds better access to post-baccalaureate pre-medical programs, with an emphasis on launching them at community colleges.

“The idea is that folks who are coming through those systems can go into post-bac programs that increase the chances of them getting into medical school,” Dr. Casillas recalled. “We want to equip them for that educational journey knowing that there’s a highly disproportionate representation of Latino students who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds where they have less access to good educational resources.”

In Dr. Casillas’ view, having more Latinx physicians doesn’t just benefit Latinos, but all patients. Dealing with illness is challenging no matter your background; even patients with access to resources and education struggle with isolation in the face of a serious diagnosis. Many Latino physicians understand these feelings of being an outsider in the healthcare system well, she said.

“By design, that group of physicians is more likely to return to the place they came from to provide health care, more likely to take care of patients from all insurance and socioeconomic statuses, and more likely to engage in advocacy for their patient populations no matter what kind of patient they are,” she said.

Dr. Casillas believes one of the best ways for institutions to support the careers of Latino physicians — and all physicians — is to create an environment where they feel free to be themselves. That lays a foundation that leads to more fulfillment in their work, she explained.

“In particular, for professionals in historically marginalized demographics, the feeling is that you have to sort of hide a part of who you are and not show up as your full self, because that’s getting in the way of your job,” Dr. Casillas said. “When we create environments where our Latino physicians can show up as their full selves and pursue work passions and projects that may be related to their identity, their community, their mission in life, they will reveal talents that we may not have imagined and realize even more of their vast potential. I feel like if we can work towards that, we can better retain and better empower them to make change that really benefits all of our patients.”

Veronica Ramirez, MD

Just as Dr. Ramirez’s presence had affected her patients, the presence of other Latinos in medicine affected her as well, even early on: When she took part in a special program for undergraduates from underrepresented groups to learn what medical school is like, she met mentors who, like her, were first-generation Latinos and the first in their families to go into medicine.

“I found some direction in my path towards applying to medical school by hearing their stories about them having gone through similar experiences as I had,” she recalled. “It was really life changing and changed my career. All of these experiences together gave me a sense that I wanted to serve my community, especially the most medically underserved.”

Dr. Ramirez does exactly that as a hospitalist at UCLA, where she is the clinical lead for the UCLA Downtown Hospitalist Cohort that serves Barlow Respiratory Hospital and Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital. Besides treating a predominantly Latino patient population, she also serves as a supervising attending physician on the inpatient wards for the internal medicine residency program at MLKCH. This role gives her an opportunity to train the next generation of physicians — several of whom are Latino — who want to practice in their South L.A. community or in areas that are medically underserved.

“There’s a social consciousness to the program and that gives them a particular focus,” Dr. Ramirez said of the program’s trainees. For her, teaching is a way to pass on not only clinical knowledge, but the importance of being advocates for this vulnerable patient population.

“I am so grateful for the mentors that I had throughout my training, and I knew that when I became an attending, I wanted to pay it forward and help train those who followed behind me to become the best physicians and patient advocates that they could be,” she said.

Dr. Ramirez also advocates for Latino patients and physicians beyond the hospital as an active member of the National Hispanic Medical Association (NHMA) and the National Hispanic Health Foundation, NHMA’s philanthropic arm, and as the co-faculty advisor of First-Gen at DGSOM. She was a fellow in an NHMA leadership program last year, during which she worked on a policy team that came up with a proposal to make medical education more financially accessible — a strategy that could go a long way toward correcting the gaping underrepresentation of Latino physicians in California and the wider U.S.

“We know that underrepresented in medicine applicants and students feel the heaviest financial burden when starting medical school,” Dr. Ramirez said. “If we’re able to help that not be a deterrent for them applying to medical school, we think that will help contribute to increasing the number of underrepresented physicians in our profession.”

Dr. Ramirez wants Latino and Latina trainees to remember that if they truly aspire to be of service to their community, they belong in medicine. She encourages them to find mentors like herself and other attendings who can help them keep going when things get tough.

“Despite all of the challenges that you may face, it’ll be incredibly worth it in the end,” she said. “Find mentors you know that you can trust, that you can lean on. And stick with it, because we need you in this profession, and your future patients need you.”

In addition to being a talented physician and fierce advocate for her patients and Latinx representation in medicine, Dr. Ramirez is also an incredible mariachi singer, a dancer and a guitarist. She has toured with Linda Ronstadt and is so renown in the mariachi community that Latin Grammy-nominated band Mariachi Sol de Mexico even asked her to take part in an impromptu performance with them at their Tustin restaurant Casa del Sol!

Enjoy this video of Dr. Ramirez performing with Mariachi Sol de Mexico and this photo of her with her fellow members of the mariachi ensemble at Cue Music School in Montebello, directed by Maestro Jimmy Cuellar. We are so proud of her for all of her accomplishments and honored that she is part of the DoM!

DoM LEADERS Celebrate First Official National Latino and Latina Physician Day

For the past two years, Latinx physicians across the state have celebrated the “unofficial” National Latino and Latina Physician Day on October 1. This year was different: As of August 28, the day is officially recognized by California law.

“This is huge, huge, huge,” Veronica Ramirez, MD, clinical lead for the Downtown Hospitalist Cohort and a UCLA LEADER in advocating for Latinx representation in medicine. “Our hope is that this will also become official legislation at the federal level.”

National Latino and Latina Physician Day is part of a broader effort to raise awareness of the shortage of Latinx physicians, a nationwide problem that is especially dire in California. While 40% of the state’s population identifies as Latino or Latina, a UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute study published in 2023 found that only 6.4% of its physicians are Latino — and only 2.7% are Latina. The next generation is faring better, but not by much: Just 11% of medical school matriculants in California are Latinx.

That matters for patients, Dr. Ramirez said, particularly women.

“You can see where there’s a huge gap between the need to serve our female patients and the providers who are able to provide linguistic and culturally competent care,” someone said. “And there’s plenty of research that shows that when patients are cared for by providers who look like them, who understand their cultural background, that it improves patient outcomes.”

Ideally, official recognition of National Latino and Latina Physician Day will rev up momentum to increase the pipeline of Latinx physicians, Alejandra Casillas, MD, an internist and health services researcher who is also one of our LEADERS in the movement for Latinx representation in medicine, said.

“For any issue or challenge, I think one of the first steps is raising awareness and a sense of urgency that takes us away from complacency and acceptance,” Dr. Casillas said. “Obviously bringing awareness is not a policy resolution, an intervention or creating a new program, but I think it’s the rallying cry that we need.”

Dr. Casillas was in Sacramento with other members of the 2024 National Hispanic Health Foundation Leadership Fellowship on the day National Latino and Latina Physician Day was officially passed into state law. That was a happy accident ­— they were in town to meet with leaders in the California Department of Public Health and Centene, the largest health net Medicaid provider in the country, and to talk about policy points for proposals some groups of fellows in the program are working on. They were also planning to honor Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, MD, who sponsored the legislation, with an award for his service.

The serendipitous timing was “really fortunate,” Dr. Casillas recalled.

The effort to get National Latino Physician Day recognized nationwide is underway. In the meantime, advocates inside and beyond the DoM are working on ways to build a Latino physician coalition with other UC schools to strengthen the community and come up with new strategies to combat the shortage.

“Being that we are the public institution that serves this highly Latino population in California, a coalition would be incredible,” Dr. Casillas said. “When you get people together in the same room, in that safe space, that’s where you start creating innovative ideas for action.”

Latinx physicians from the DoM celebrated this wonderful news and their accomplishments together during an event on Oct. 1 organized by UCLA HEDI, UCLA JEDI, UCLA and the DGSOM. The program included a keynote speech from UCLA Spanish Speaking Psychosocial Clinic Director Erica Lubliner, MD, a physician panel, and a reception. DoM representatives on the panel included internist Diana Lopez, MD, who practices at UCLA-Olive View, and Dr. Ramirez. Dr. Casillas introduced Dr. Lubliner, while David Hayes-Bautista, PhD, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at DGSOM, delivered the closing remarks.

For those who couldn’t make it to this year’s event, watch our recap video to experience the joy of celebrating culture and community for yourself!

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